Moderator note: Moved these posts as they veered off-topic.
Yeh, that is frustrating but not surprising. Brazen is as brazen does. It’s not like he’s going to stop being himself.
Is the Falcon 500 the only differentiating product that needs to be superseded by a non-Vex product to enable FRC to further separate from Vex? I know Neo+Sparkmax exists, but clearly many teams believe Falcons outperform them and are unwilling to give up the performance advantage.
I think there’s more of a wiring advantage than a performance advantage. Most people hate the fragile encoder cable on the Neo
No, there are additional products. While the max planetary is a great planetary, it is also physically large. The vex planetary offers more options in a smaller package. The ultraplanetary doesn’t meet the torque specs of the vex planetary, so the vex planetary currently fills the ‘niche’ in between the two. It is ideal for a neo550 gearbox that needs to fit in a small place but be a large reduction.
Simple solution, start a competitor and then just don’t be a terrible company and people will buy it even if it’s a bit worse.
“Simple”
Clearly they won’t, as demonstrated by the massive market share Falcons still command.
EDIT: also, JVN’s move to be CTO (?) of CTRE has me extremely displeased.
I wonder how easily “PG gearboxes” could be adapted to Neo 550s.
You don’t get the extra slices, but it seems like it would be a lighter- solution than a Sport with a 550.
Falcons I hate to say this from a software perspective are far superior to Neos and it’s a big change to swap whereas gearboxes aren’t much of a change compared to swapping a whole code base
How are they programaticilly superior? I’ve only ever worked with sparks so correct me if I’m wrong, but they are relatively easy to work with progamaticlly, with the only major feature differences being CAN FD and FOC(if you pay).
A lot more low level control is exposed that’s the main thing, but I will say that doesn’t really matter to most teams.
Like what?
Like configurable parameters 1 through 700 something which don’t even have real functions, maybe cpp gives this for Neos but the java jni for falcons has absolutely everything that the motor can do accessible to the user even extremely low level settings.
I’ve found ctre electronics to be more reliable than rev electronics. I think my ctre failure rate is 60-0 and rev is 25-1.
Yeah, Neos encoder cable and Smax is the downside, both motors on the market have their problems
I wish someone came up with a brushless motor with a detachable “hat” controller. that would be the perfect setup, I think.
What’s the official process for getting motors and motor controllers approved for FRC?
As far as I understand (using an xkcd calculus comic as a visual aid):
TLDR: the approval process seems incredibly opaque and I have never been able to find public-facing information about it.
It is a incredibly arduous process, it beings at champs where you have to gather or lure all members of the GDC, then you have to get them all inside a conference room and you won’t let them out until they sign a contract to approve your devices, that is why it is so hard /j
Can I shed some light on it? I’m gonna try my best to explain without straying into details I can’t reveal without permission. This is how it was when we inquired about motors approximately 4 months ago.
So there are two categories here: motors, and motor controllers. Motor controllers are relatively straight forward. Basically, there is a list of tests that your controller has to pass for safety reasons. If your controller passes these tests after certification from FIRST, you are allowed to sell it. You can imagine the kinds of tests the run, but without saying too much its pretty much safety checks. There is some stuff in there where you need to maintain adequate stocking for teams to buy from but its not terribly hard to hit if you are well funded. Generally, I believe its around a year or two from presenting to FIRST to approval and sale, mostly because of time needed to test and probably iterate your design if it fails.
Motors, well, motors are… fascinating. There are again some regs with them but its a lot more nebulous then motor controllers, probably because the motors themselves are basically fancy paperweights without the controllers. Its kinda assumed you are submitting a motor with your motor controller as far as I know, and I think they are tested together? I’m not quite clear on that one. Anyway, the old regs were you submitted your motor, and it was approved if it met some checks and it was something “to donate in significant quantity”.
What “donate in significant quantity” meant… I’m not quite sure, but available evidence and some light questions indicated some KOP donation or something along those lines. But it did mean if you were introducing a motor, you were introducing thousands at a time, giving away a ton of motors for free in the process. That’s basically impossible resource wise for a startup, so motors are kinda restricted to the rich vendors who can afford to basically take a pile of money out and burn it (this kinda reinforces a monopoly on motors but… that may be a good thing. Means very committed vendors have to enter the market, and it also maintains a market for vendors to make their money from).
The motor checks are honestly pretty sane, making sure your motor won’t explode, cause issues, etc. You have to maintain semi-decent stock as a vendor, can’t have favourite teams, and be accessible by all teams (or the vast majority at least).
There is much more to it, but I honestly don’t know how much FIRST would be ok with me disclosing.
The tl;dr (see my above post) is you come up with a motor design, you send it to FIRST, they check the motors, if it passes inspections its approved to sell.
And in the process you basically need to take tens of thousands of dollars, put it in a pile, and light it on fire.
