My team is looking for some advice. I would like to know from you guys what SRX has worked better for you. We need to choose between Victor Srx’s or Talon Srx’s
I’m assuming you mean the Victor SPX rather than the Victor SP. Unless you need the encoder port, they’re functionally identical for FRC purposes (the SRX has a higher max voltage, but batteries are only 13v).
The closed loop control on the Talons are pretty nice if your team doesn’t want to implement things Rio side.
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The Victor SPX (its not called an SRX) is a very good motor controller. By all means the Talon SRX is just as good (actually even better). A lot depends on your budget and use case.
Infinite budget and you never hit the BOM cost limit? Always buy Talon SRX
Small budget or get close to hitting the BOM cost limit? Victor SPX is a solid option
There are other factors to consider as well:
In a 2 or 3 motor gearbox, 99% of teams will only ever benefit from having 1 of those motors run by a Talon SRX. The other(s) could/should be run by a Victor SPX (or 2 Victor SPXes with a 3 motor gearbox) running in slave mode alongside the 1 Talon SRX.
If you are planning on doing motion profiling or other forms of PID based motion, the Talon SRX has internal computing hardware to manage those calculations and offload them from the RoboRio. However, my comment above still stands because the other motors in a gearbox can just be run in slave mode (very close to same speed/volts/amps to motor) from a Victor SPX tied in software to a Talon SRX.
I’m assuming that you aren’t considering the Falcon 500 (which use an integrated Talon FX), but they are analogous to a Talon SRX in many ways.
Before anyone in this thread can give you a 100% accurate answer, you need to provide a bit more information:
What motors are you planning on using?
What is your budget for motor controllers?
What is your teams level of programming expertise?
What functions do you want from a motor controller?
How long do you expect to use these controllers before upgrading them or purchasing new ones?
And as much other information about your search for a motor controller as you can provide.
As a general rule (with minimal exceptions), a Talon SRX and a Victor SPX are the same in reliability, and were produced to be complements to each other. A Talon SRX is more expensive but has a few more features, and a Victor SPX is intended to be a cheaper alternative with the exact same raw performance and reliability (in the realm of FRC at least).
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Talons have the firmware to run current limiting, in addition to closed-loop controls with a sensor.
Victors can follow a Talon, but do not run their own current limiting, and do not run their own closed-loop controls.
Having one talon on each side of our drive allowed us to run a really aggressively fast drivetrain gearing (~19fps) and “fix it in code” when that resulted in brownouts (too much current draw).
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This is what 2702 did. There really isn’t a reason to run two talons on a side.
Yeah. We do it just because we have them, but really kind of pointless.
Lower unique parts count is rarely a bad thing!
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OP - the responses so far are a good summary of the differences and pros/cons of the controller.
Any thoughts on how you might be using these controllers? Are they powering a WCD drivetrain? Will you be using them to do some type of autonomous routine? Do you plan to do path-following or more advanced control techniques?
Will they be on a mechanism, like an arm? Will the arm be manually controlled (ie, joystick commands motor voltage), or do you need limit switches and closed loop “indexing” to preset positions?
With a couple examples of usage, there might be some additional advice we could squeeze out - help you decide “doesn’t matter, go cheap” or “matters, bite the extra cost”.
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