I was wondering, what is the difference between the CTRE Pigeon and the NavX MXP. They look pretty similar on paper but are very different in design and cost. Is there something that I’m missing here? Also do any of you have a preference of one over the other?
Both are amazing and fill different niches. We’ve used both and think they both have their purpose.
Perhaps Omar can chime in as well as Scott but the Zebracorns stand by both products equally and while we have yet to deploy the Pigeon on a competition robot you can bet we are writing code and looking at it as the newcomer in the IMU space, particularly since it uses the same chip as the NavX.
We love the pigeon and would recommend it to anyone. My favorite part about it is that you can plug directly into a spare talon. Also you can wire it such that it has dedicated power and can be hooked up into the CAN bus.
We also saw VERY little drift with our swerve this year.
You guys didn’t use the Spartan Board gyro :P?
Normally we would’ve and it’s worked great for us as well. We used the Spartan board gyro on our 2015 swerve and 2016 robot with no issues. But this year we had nothing plugged into the Rio so we opted for something else.
We used the navx board this year and while the hardware was fine, I was a bit underwhelmed with the software library (at least for Java). It was poorly documented and the source was a bit of a mess.
I think we will use the CTRE Pigeon in the future.
We used the pigeon this year. Liked it a lot. Compact, lightweight, simple wiring, software interface in Talon library, just worked.
We have used both of them, and we have Beta Tested Labview code for both of them. My opinion is you will be happy with either choice (i.e. no buyer regrets)
What you can expect from both of them:
- Helpful and quick customer support. Both companies could school so many other companies (not related to FFRC) about what REAL customer service means.
- A low-drift yaw reading. Perform the calibration procedure on them…it makes a difference.
Some differences:
- Low rate accuracy: We used a Bosch IMU in the past. It had no drift at all, but it would not pick up low yaw rates, which caused us issues pointing at targets. The NavX was better than the Bosch, but we could still see some error during low rate turns. The Pigeon did not appear to have this issue. Sorry, no quantitative data to offer here. Maybe as an off-season experiment we can collect some with a rate table.
- Mounting location flexibility: the pigeon has few limitations because it can plug into a talon or get wired into the CAN bus. The NavX will be on your MXP port but the NavX micro (I2C interface) can be mounted anywhere.
- Early in the season, we had a talon go bad that happened to have the pigeon plugged into it. It’s possible the back of the pigeon shorted with the frame. It’s possible the pigeon had nothing to do with the talon going south. For risk aversion, we plugged into a talon that was not mission critical and insulated the back well and had no further issues.
- If your CAN bus is already heavily loaded or busy, I am not sure what, if any, effect this will have on data latency from the Pigeon. Our bus was 60% or less. If you do have a heavily loaded bus, I would suggest researching to determine if there are risks.
- As of the 2017 season, the Pigeon Labview libraries were more intuitive to use and the documentation was easier to follow IMO.
If your resources allow, I would recommend being able to deploy either. Both of these companies are heavily innovative, and I am sure we will see new features from them. We feel being familiar with both their hardware and software makes us better able to quickly adopt useful features with less learning curve.
We have used both. The NavX was awesome, and so was the pigeon. You will not be disappointed with either product.
The biggest reason we switched to the Pigeon was the you can plug it in to a talon, or Can Bus, and you’re done. That gave us much more flexibility placing it where we wanted it and still keeping very short wires. It ‘just works’. CTRE needs to change their motto to “Making stuff way easier than it should be”.
Again let me reiterate - both are absolutely awesome products.
I Saw a press release today that the makers of the chip that both companies use was bought. This could be good or it could be bad for the future. Will TDK take Invensense IP and roll it into their new market strategies or Will they continue on as they are now. Will they be open with their software firmware with small players like these two companies. There was a time when the 2 companies would have had an impossible time dealing with Invensense.
Question. Has anybody tried and compared the Bosch chip with these 2? I’ve seen many FTC teams use the Bosch solution.
Thanks everyone for the insight. We just ended up buying both of them and I’m going to experiment with them over the summer. If I find anything of significance I’ll be sure to put it on this thread.