Collateral Damage to our suppliers as a result of moving away from Vex

FIRST General Forum
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To me. I will buy VEX and rename it to LeftShore Products. We will make it our mission to bring Mountain Dew and Taco Bell to every competition. Nom Nom Nom.

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Does this mean we’re gonna struggle to buy new TalonSRXs as well? That might be rough…

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24

There’s probably enough stock of those to find anywhere. We have a box full of them we don’t use anymore but keep them just incase but we wouldn’t buy anymore of them if we needed any. We would use Rev spark motor controller since that’s the only other brushed motor controller that I know of for frc use

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Yeah, assuming a bunch of teams don’t panic buy and hoard like 50… We also have at least 10 or so spares and plenty of SRX-compatible motors (CIM family, 775, etc.), so I wasn’t really worried as much about short term but more of the long term effects. However, now that I think about it, this would probably be sorted out by then, and CTRE would most likely get another company to begin manufacturing SRXs or just do it themselves.

I do worry, though, that if the supply for SRXs does suffer, then low resource teams using all CIMs may suffer as well.

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Low resource teams would be reusing motor controllers anyway. Spark Maxes are also capable of driving brushed motors, so they can be used as a replacement, too.

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27

IndySam’s got it.
Sometimes the question arises as to why IFI hasn’t simply bought CTRE and rolled them into VexPro, which has a complex and storied answer.

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28

I’m not sure why I didn’t know this but that’s pretty cool. And useful.

Also–the issue stands more for low resource rookie teams, who are buying their first motor controllers. But the problem is most likely solved by Spark Maxes.

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It’s a shame REV doesn’t sell the classic Spark anymore… I remember getting two of them in the KOP in 2017 and they were the coolest thing ever (to a freshman in high school)

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I thought they could but wasn’t sure so I didn’t want to state that they could

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IIRC they’re still sold by some vendors? I can’t remember which vendor, but I remember at least one sold SPARKs a few months ago.

(also this is getting off-topic lol)

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Old stock. They’ve been officially discontinued.

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