Did your team prefer using Jaguars or Victors last year and why?
We used Victors because we wanted to maximize space for our ball hopper and putting the electronics in a box meant it was easier to fit 9 Victors than 9 Jaguars.
1618 used four Jaguars. They came in the kit and they worked (our own electrical issues aside).
2815 used, as I remember, four Jaguars and two Victors, also largely driven by availability. Jaguars went on the belts and shooter drums, Victors on the two drive motors.
Team RUSH switched to all Jaguars on the competition bot last year in anticipation of being able to use the enhanced features in the near future.
I’m personally very excited about CAN and the opportunity to teach our students about it.
I currently work with CAN on a daily basis in automotive applications…and I’m positive that none of our students even know it exists or how it works inside their vehicles.
We used the Jaguars where we wanted fine control (drive and shooter) and the Victors for on/off (lift belt and turret).
Team Krunch used four jaguars for drive and four victors for manipulation on our robot. In addition to availability we considered weight and ease of replacement/addition. We had spots made for up to 10 victors on our board.
Yeah I can honestly say I hadn’t the slightest clue it existed until hearing about it when they unveiled the new equipment at Atlanta in 2008.
The ausTIN CANs used 6 Jaguars and 2 Victors. The Jags went to our 3-wheel swerve drive, and the Victors were on our turret and shooter. We also had two Spikes on our lift (one feeding roller and one belt).
Personally, I’m very impressed with the Jaguars, more so than the Victors. We’ve been careful enough (in general) not to kill any motor controllers this year other than individuals’ mistakes, but the Jaguars have kept cooler and provided more consistent and linear power than the Victors. I’m also very excited about using the CAN bus next year, it’ll be great to teach serial communication protocols (none are really being taught from the ground up, even in FIRST, all of the networking is embedded deep in the magic boxes).
399 used 2 jaguars for the drive.
The only victor that we had was for the conveyor,
we only really ran it at full speed so the low speed capabilities of the jaguars weren’t needed for it.
(We also had a spike for the dumper)
We only broke one jaguar, and it was a defective one.
Powered on and smoke blew everywhere.
Jaguars. They’re a little bit bigger, but their output is a Lot more controllable. Color-coded screws are a bit more fool-resistant.
We used 2 Jags and 4 Victors in 2009
During competition season we used 4 Jaguars (2 drive, 1 pickup, 1 dump) and 1 Victor (for the second dump motor). We have to use the one victor simply because we ran out of room and needed a second motor for our dumper to work effectively.
We had no problems with the Jaguars all season…
Then when we started making enhancements for IRI we replaced the 4 Jaguars with 4 Victors. We made this switch because we needed the extra real-estate to make room for traction control hardware. We fit 5 Victors (with room for one more) in the same foot print the 4 Jaguars previously occupied.
We haven’t made a determination on what we’ll use for 2010 since we don’t know what will be available and what our size constraints will be.
I’m really excited about CAN. I think that about 10% of teams will really dig into it this year, and that they will create some solutions with it that (although not game changing) will make us rethink a few common design memes. Hopefully the year after, newer teams will benefit from “how you CAN make your robot drive straight” tutorials.
I’m not saying that CAN will let you do things that are impossible now, I’m just hoping it lowers the ((entrance)) bar for some of the fundamentals.
Most of the features that the CAN bus allows us to do are easily doable now.
The speed (Voltage) control mode, is the mode we are using through PWMs.
The Analog position input (Potentiometer)
has been done by almost everyone using an arm (PID control)
The Encoder position control
Can be done this year, use a PID controller and have your setpoint be a # of ticks
Limit switches - Digital input,
if(input && (abs(speed)/speed) == limitDirection) motor.set(0.0);
else motor.set(speed);
Though, the real advantage of using CAN is that the Jags handle the monitoring, and control internally.
Which can provide the fastest response possible in a closed loop.
(At least with the motors & controllers we can use)
And any faults can be read by the RIO,
ex: does that red slow blink mean the limit switch has been triggered or is the jaguar dead?
Conditions like: over-current, under voltage (ie 6v from battery), limit switch, or over temperature; can easily be read from like the driverstation LCD instead of guessing.
Also having access to all the motors variables (current, voltage, torque, speed) without having to put in a large coil of wire for a current sensor is nice.
http://www.luminarymicro.com/products/mdl_bdc.html
BD-BDC-DS-01 Datasheet for Brushed DC Motor Control Module
We used 8 Victors, simply because Jaguars would not fit, and were not aesthetically pleasing in our design.
EDIT: Also, we already had plenty of Victors from previous seasons, whereas we would have needed to purchase more Jaguars.
We used both last year, Jags on the drive train, victors on everything else.
Victors; Tried and true, fairly bullet-proof.
Jaguars; Nice linear response, motors were much quieter with higher frequency response, held up well so far. Waiting for CAN bus to hopefully simplify wiring.
We’re happy with both, hopefully we will be allowed to continue to choose which controller we wish to use for our specific applications.
We ended up using Victors last year, mostly because all of our Jaguars fried pretty quick. We’ll probably be using Victors again this year, as well.
2834 used 4 jaguars:
Talking to other veteran teams in our area, we decided that the jaguars would work best, despite the slightly bigger size. Besides, there were 4 jaguars in the KoP, but there were not 4 victors.
wow seems to be about even in the poll.
Might change assuming they DO allow the CAN on the Jags this year.
Last year on 1776, we used mostly Victors. The Jaguars were used only for cost avoidance (by which I mean real money rather than Bill of Materials cost accounting money). We didn’t need fine control at low speed for the design we were using, and we did need more space and less mass.
Given the CAN bus, we might have done a different design to use it.
Our team used victors for the competition. 2 for drive and one for turret rotation. Also a spike for the compressor. This year, we plan to use Jaguars as we got them working on our robot for drive. If we are feeling adventurous and we have enough, we will also use Jaguars for other things we need.
Our team used all jaguars this year and I was pleased with both their performance and price. The only issues that our team had with the jaguars was, our jaguar that controlled the motor that moved our spiral which moved the moon rocks to the top, stop working in the forward motion twice. Unfortunately this happened in the finials causing us to lose a match. The weird part of this is that the jaguar stilled worked in reverse as well as the other functions, the only thing that did not work was the forward motion. When we opened them up on both occasions we found that the circuit board had melted in one spot near the fan. We sent them back to Luminary micro for analysis but we have not herd any thing back. Our belief is that it something unique about the way we had the motor set up and the amps it drew. Other then the problem above we had no problems and all the original jaguars are still on our machine. I would suggest that teams start using jaguars if they have not already. I also look forward to exploring the new features that we will be evadible this year.
Matthew Simpson
Team 75 VP