Our team is trying to decide if the technical/programming lift of implementing FOC on our Falcons/Krakens is a worthwhile endeavor. Does anyone have any input on this?
There’s no real technical cost, other than specifying an alternate control signal type and possibly modifying your feedforward model to omit the EMF term. You do need to use it with a form of closed-loop control, though.
If you’ve paid for the feature, use it.
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From a physics perspective, are there measurable gains in terms of acceleration/torque/etc? We haven’t bought Phoenix Pro yet so this will likely be what drives our decision.
Yes, there are measurable gains. They’re not large, but not trivial either. It’s about what you’d expect from what is essentially a “timing optimization”, to use an engine analogy.
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You can compare here the motor curves with and without FOC when limited to 60 Amps.
The motor with FOC has ~5% higher power at 60 Amps than the one without. Not huge, but worth it IMO when there’s no tradeoff except $100/season.
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Disclaimer we have not used Pheonix pro.
I think the value of foc is particularly dependent on your robot and swerve decisions. If you are running SDS L1 or L2 you may not see big gains as you have lots of torque. If you are L3+ then there may be more use. Also depends how tippy your bot is. If you are tippy then the gains in acceleration are not of use. Also if your robot is heavy then the extra power will help with acceleration but a light robot will probably see less gains.
Ultimately it comes down to goals and funding. If you have lots of money then $100 for better battery life, etc. is probably worth it. If you are getting Pheonix pro anyway it’s worth it. If you are trying to be the best robot on the level of 2056, 254, 4414, 1323 etc. the. It’s worth it.
Also consider other Pheonix pro features like fused cancoder, timesync, etc.
You can do TorqueCurrentFoc as an open loop request, and the other open loop requests have a withEnableFOC method. Not exactly sure how that works under the hood
This isn’t good for much unless you have an outer loop of some sort.
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