was browsing the FIRST site to check out the newly added devices on the “Legal Devices List,” and I found it interesting that AndyMark released a new motor controller.
I want to make it clear that I have no criticism of AndyMark as a company—my team relies on many of their mechanisms—but this motor controller stood out to me as a bit unusual. It seems overly simplistic for a typical 2025 FRC team. For instance, it doesn’t support CAN communication, and I wasn’t able to find a library for it.
My theory is that this is intended as a starter or more affordable controller for FRC, especially since the CTRE VictorSPX has been deprecated. However, as a veteran from a foreign team (I’m from Brazil, by the way), I find it hard to judge the price gap between controllers because everything here costs 2–3 times the U.S. price.
Again, I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to criticize AndyMark in any way. I’m just genuinely curious about this new release.
Yea, I don’t imagine they have a huge amount of market share, but there’s a ton of teams who still do their design and engineering with brushed motors, and they ain’t going away any time soon.
I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. I hope it’s not in the KOP. It’s a sunk cost trap.
When $90-$120 ($80 if a nova supports brushed) buys something forward compatible with a brushless motor, a $50 dead end pwm speed controller isn’t the right choice for the top 100 percentile of FRC teams.
A “prototyping speed controller” that’s “available late January” isn’t very useful either.
Most importantly it’s just a weird product to name after a founder.
Every shop with abundant CIMs and Redlines also should also have enough period correct Spark, Spark MAX, Talon, Talon SRX, Victor 884, Victor 888, Victor SP, SPX Motor Controllers that are laying around too.
Teams, especially ones with tight budgets, should be making purchase decisions with a multi year trajectory. Buy SparkMaxes this year and Neo v1.1s next year.
I think you’re ignoring just how flagrantly cheap the bottom, struggle-bus-tier teams can be. And sometimes, have to be. Yes, some of those teams probably should be in FTC. But they’re here, and having a $50 option to keep them (or just a generic, non-competition robot) operational is still a good thing even if it’s got a low ceiling compared to Nova and SPARK MAX. The net $120-160 saved over the course of a drivetrain isn’t nothing, and that’s assuming the team can even buy from other vendors under school policies.
Mark and I were ships in the night in Kokomo; he retired from AndyMark about a month after I got there. But it should say a bit about his approach that the last new product he really shipped while at AndyMark was a revised 8" mecanum wheel in 2016. And mecanum was a dirty word to some teams then, to the point that the next year’s April Fools joke was selling the 4" light-duty mecanums as 4" Vectored Intake Wheels.
Not 1:1 but they aren’t wrong about them accumulating… We have a giant collection of VictorSPX, TalonSRX that we only reasonably use 2-4 of each season for non-brushless mechanisms. We only used brushless for drive trains or a shooter, but brushed for anything else so we needed more of them at one point.
The one big advantage of a PWM system is it is isolated from the CAN network and for teams that struggle with secure/reliable CAN they can divert simple stuff over to PWM. If the shooter, intake, conveyor, arm, climber motor controller on CAN shuts down, is damaged, disconnected in a CAN network the rest of the devices on that network also might go down.
The PWM system goes down (usually wire disconnect), the affected motor is shut down, but the rest are unaffected in most cases. You could still drive and possibly do other actions minus one motor.
Just because something is FRC legal doesn’t mean it’s part of the formula for a trip to Einstein.
As others have said, you can’t buy a lot of the old brushed motor controllers anymore, and they tended to burn out a lot quicker than the old brushed motors (whether by heavy use, or a student connecting power wires in reverse…)
Having a new, basic controller for new members to learn the magic-free (no built in sensor ports for internal PID) fundamentals of building a robot is awesome. Once they get the hang of that, they can move up to the “real” stuff.
Make a quick and dirty prototype
– This is where low cost materials; i.e., cheap motors, become helpful.
Measure what the prototype does
Use the measured behavior to correct any assumptions made in step 2.
Like all great engineers, Mark knew that all models (simulations) are wrong, and that some of them are useful anyway. The useful ones are those that have been through the steps above.
