We used both Falcon’s and NEO’s this year on our robot. In terms of next season, we are worried about buying new motors due to the Falcon 500 manufacturing issues and complaints many have voiced over the past two seasons. We love the performance that the Falcon motors provide, yet, we don’t want to make a poor financial decision in the long run. NEO’s are great, yet we are worried about the Spark MAX controllers and their long-term reliability (especially the cable between the motor and the controller itself). As a team, we would love to hear the communities opinion on the issue, and any problems they’ve experienced from both motors.
Our entire swerve drivetrain this year was made from reused 8x Falcon V2 motors off of our 2022 robot mostly from intake or feeder duties but I’m sure a climber motor made it in too. Used through 2 regular season regional events and 3 off-season events.
We suffered zero failures throughout this entire season.
4 events ~ 12 qual matches plus playoffs each.
Our primary demo robot is a 2020 robot that uses all NEOs but doesn’t get beat on as hard, but at the same time. No failures to report and has seen no motor replacements as part of its upkeep.
NEOs can be very reliable long term. My team has some from a 2020 drivetrain that we used this season for an arm mechanism. Any brushless motors are much better for long-term usage because of the lack of brushes to be worn. The cables aren’t a worry as long as you route them correctly.
NEO’s encoder wires can be annoying if they break off, but they shouldn’t if you don’t have the spark max and neo move separately. I’ve only seen the jsts break on the intake on 112 this year, I haven’t seen them break any other times. You can always recrimp the jsts if they break.
Our robot was basically all v2s iirc, about 13 falcons or so in total, all used for at least 1 if not 2 previous seasons. Only issues we ran into were with oversaturing the CANFD bus silently killing Talon motor controllers, even when CAN utilization was reportedly 45%.
We ran all falcons in our drivetrain and neos everywhere else. We have been running the same falcons from release. We have done the recommended updates, as well as switching to thriftybot steel shafts, and never had an issue.
Neos dont take work straight out of the box, but we have had a variety of issues with the 550s. I suspect that most of the issues were due to over currenting, but we have had a 3 or 4 spark maxes go into unrecoverable states.
Editted to add: the exit point of the neo 550 wires is problematic because it lays right over the mounting holes for planetaries. Overzealous students stab the wires with allen keys and ruin them, or allow the wires to rub the bolts and get pinched.
“Falcons require multiple fixes out of the box. NEOs don’t, but we broke a couple of these other unrelated motors by the same company, so pick your poison.”
We think the canivore is underreporting utilization by a factor of 2, at least on Pro firmware. Approaching 46-47% made one of our motor controllers randomly “die” 5-50 seconds after the robot was enabled, meaning the talon stopped providing power to hold our arm up, the leds turned from blinking green to off then to solid yellow iirc. It disappeared from the can network for a few seconds, then reappeared and wouldnt “reconnect” to code until a code reboot
Another reason we believe this is a utilization issue is we also had issues with latency jumping from 10ms to over 200 at times when the utilization was reported at 47%, no such issues when we dropped utilization to 40
We were an all NEO team this last year and never had a single failure on either of our robots. Last year we had two Falcon motors fail on our drive. Your millage may vary.
Having said that, as long as the current ownership/leader structure remains we will never purchase another Vex product again.
In terms of reliability as a whole, the JSTs on NEOs are simply too fragile for me to believe they’re more reliable long-term unless you’re very careful with wiring, strain relief, and generally protecting the encoder wire like your life depends on it.
CAN utilization when there are two CAN busses could be tricky to compute – a single number really doesn’t make sense. Not having used a CANivore, I’m not sure how things are reported. Reporting a number for each bus is the ideal, but a single number should really be the max (if there has to be a single number). I could see a single number being the average of the two bus utilizations though, which could explain why ~50% is the max.
We’ve been using the same set of Falcons v2s connected to the same canivore for 2 years and they’ve worked great. We did have one Falcon failure this year but that was because we forgot to QC that one ourselves and add Loctite. So not really a motor issue, more of a team organization issue.
Neos have been great. Weve used them since 2019. Weve maybe had 1 spark max go bad. The only time weve broke neo motors is when weve done stuff that we shouldnt have.
