Our team is trying to lighten the weight of this year robot’s chassis. We already have neo motors and spark controllers on hand but want to know what are some pros and cons of neos verses cims
P.s. we know about the lag of the neos but that will be fixed in a new update
CIMS: Work with every motor controller, slightly cheaper motor, and battle tested for 15 years.
NEOs/SparkMAX: New, not perfect (though the reversing lag issue was fixed a week ago), more powerful, significantly lighter, better stall resistance than a 775 (not not as good as a CIM), but never used in comp.
A 6 CIM to 6 NEO drive motor swap saves around 12lbs (remember, that’s 12lbs of low weight gone, which could lead to tipping issues), and your power consumption looks more like a 6 MiniCIM drive.
At this point in the season, you can probably get your chassis a bit lighter by combining mechanisms where possible, using thinner material, moving to #25 chain from #35, etc. You don’t want to back yourself into a corner that forces you to use NEOs, and that situation can probably be avoided at this point.
Our team recently converted our drive train from 6 CIM to 6 Neo without much hassle. We haven’t heavily tested the performance, but we’re planning on sticking to them since they save a lot of room on the robot.
If you have the time (Like 4-5 hours for us, with various non-motor issues), I’d definitely consider testing with and without the CIMs.
The neo’s are lighter but also brushless while cims are brushed which mean they will spin as fast as they can while in use, while brushless can be more powerful over all