So I’m fairly certain that Digilent is attempting to clear out stock of their DMC60C motor controllers (they did recently close out on a lawsuit with CTR over them, you can look into that if you’re interested here). Given the circumstances I would not be super confident in these remaining supported/legal in FRC into the future, but if anyone in the hobby scene wants some 60A motor controllers for $10 a piece, it might be worth looking into.
heck I just bought a bunch for work when they were $20
@asid61 is also likely taking an L
I assume this is part of the hilarious lawsuit between Diligent and CTRE, as they have to be under market value.
Wow. Very thrifty.
You can be fairly confident in them remaining legal for 2020 given they’ve said they won’t be making substantial changes that could force a robot rebuild.
Plus might be handy for prototyping. Idk why I ordered some.
These are also 28V max, which may come in handy for RC stuffs. They’re a lil finnicky about some PWM signals, but you can’t complain at $10. Probably gonna snag some now for senior projects.
When was the last time they removed a motor controller from the allow list?
Allow-list, use inclusive language you insensitive clod.
*Yes, I am being funny but I am also genuinely trying to use these terms myself and calling them out is part of the process. Matt is a big boy and can take it.
How dare you correct me?
(And thank you for calling me on that. I’ve edited my post.)
Noooo they’re only $10 now?? I bought then at $20 and thought they were a steal.
I see what you did there.
Strictly cause of the lawsuit I could see FIRST removing them, but I would not be that surprised if they stayed around
Just going to go out on a limb and say that FIRST doesn’t care about the lawsuit unless they were somehow party to the settlement in the form of “thou shalt not be a product legal for FRC” given that FIRST had to have been aware of what these were from the start. I just don’t comprehend how you couldn’t know what they are looking at the packaging on the original DMC60.
I bought 2. 30 bucks including shipping. wow.
In for 4!
this is r/buildarobotsales, right?
I don’t think FIRST needs to make these illegal. The lawsuit seems to have related to an allegation that Digilent (a National Instruments company) directly copied Cross The Road’s code and redistributed it, infringing copyright and breaching the software licence. Digilent didn’t even file a defence with the court: the case was settled by the parties, probably because the plaintiff’s evidence seemed overwhelming.
I would surmise that these are simply being discontinued as part of the settlement, and not because of any underlying deficiency in the device.
I am curious about how closely the internal circuitry replicates a Talon SRX. It’s entirely possible that the hardware was also cloned, but the threshold for proving tortious copying of a utilitarian object (like an electronic device) is in practical terms higher than for a creative work (like software). (This is not entirely a satisfying state of affairs, but it is a complicated legal and moral problem to resolve.)
Fr though, if I was a hobby company with questionable morals I would have snatched up all of these and resold at $30+ each. 28v 60A, even from a sketch source, never comes this cheap.
I believe @marshall did a teardown of the original DMC60 when it came out. The chips used were all pretty much exactly the same as the Talon SRX’s, despite being PWM-only. I would assume the CAN version is pretty much the same internally, but they added an encoder port and another pair of wires.