Hey all! Our team is considering purchasing Pigeon 2.0 IMU’s to replace our NavX2 MXP’s to use on our new swerve robots. If any teams have switched, how has it really affected your performance and how much better is the Pigeon? I’ve heard a lot of mixed information with some people saying they’re close enough it doesn’t matter and others saying the Pigeon is leagues ahead of the NavX2. It’d be great to get some clear information!
we love our navx 2. Flawless performance and no can overhead which is a huge deal.
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Years ago my team invested substantially in NavX2 micros because we had other plans for the MXP port and liked the flexibility to place the gyro in the center of rotation in case that mattered (probably doesn’t but we never tested that).
So assuming the NavX2 MXP is similar to our NavX2 micro (which we think they are) our opinion would be for my team’s use of a gyro that it doesn’t matter. The Pigeon drifted slightly less.
we compared the NavX2 micro to the NavX2 MXP
We did test the two devices and they seemed about the same. Our one MXP failed for some unknown reason without much usage so we stayed with the micros since we had several of them. I wouldn’t condemn the MXP because of that one incident.
why we used a Pigeon instead of our NavX2 micros - not pertinent information if you are using the MXP interface
We had no intention of getting a Pigeon since we are happy with our NavX2 micro. Then the I2C debacle struck. Onboard I2C was “banned” (effectively) and we saw some problems with the MXP I2C port. Not to fear - NavX2 micro works on USB so we used that interface.
We ran out of CAN bus capacity and got a CANivore. That worked fine and solved our CAN capacity but there is apparently some restriction or bug in the WPILib USB discovery and the CANivore and NavX2 micro cannot startup on the USB without manual intervention. We bought a Pigeon a few hours before our match and it worked great. Recently bought a second one for backup.
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Thank you for the insightful response!
We personally had some issues with navxs, now most of those issues were due to improper handling and lack of up to date firmware. We were recommended pigeon 2s and have used them all pre season and they just work. This is our first swerve bot and the pigeon 2 has made it so easy, it’s literally plug and play. Either way you are getting a good product, we’ve just found navxs require a bit more work at times.
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I don’t know if this is true of the newer NavX2 Micros, but at least in comparison to the NavX2 MXP, I’m pretty sure the Pigeon 2s have like half as much sensor drift, meaning your gyro will stay accurate longer. This was our biggest motivation to move to the Pigeon 2 this season.
In either case the most drift you’ll nominally see in a match is around 3 degrees, which for some may be too much, but for most use cases, when also using vision solutions, this is perfectly fine.
While the pigeon does have better specs with regards to drift, the in-motion drift is 0.5 (navX2) vs 0.4 (pigeon2) degrees per minute- definitely not half as much drift.
The no-motion drift is 0.2 (navX2) vs 0.12 (pigeon2) degrees per hour
However, the navX2 does allow both higher acceleration and angular velocity before saturation: 4000dps (navX2) vs 2000dps (pigeon2), and 16G (navX2) vs 8G (Pigeon2)
Sources:
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I could swear when Pigeon2 launched there was some sort of marketing material that showed it was 2x better than something, but I can’t find it now, so maybe it wasn’t being compared to a NavX2 after all. 
Good point. This is very close to the max speed of our swerve robot but we don’t seem to have exceeded the Pigeon 2 capacity.
Not sure there is a way to know, though, other than the robot has lost its way which it never seemed to do. There might be method to verify the status.
But as I mentioned above we slapped the Pigeon 2 into the robot as we were loading into the trailer to go to the match. I can’t argue with how well it worked given how little thought we put into it.
$280 for a pair, if you already have a good stock of NavX2 MXP, might be too pricey for some teams.
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