Talon Failure

Technical Electrical
#1

We had a Talon failure a short while back. While testing our climber, one of the 2 Talons driving the climbing mechanism went with a loud pop and the typical smoke of a power electronics failure. I contacted Cross The Road Electronics and Mike Copioli was eager to see the failed unit. On receipt, his examination indicated overheating, but he graciously replaced the failed unit and sent some fans as well.

I just wanted to publicly thank Mike and the rest of Cross The Road Electronics for being a class act and a definite asset to the FIRST community.

#2

For being a brand new speed controller, it really is rather amazing how few issues we’ve had with it - no unexplained failures and such. But, this post highlights the reason we put fans on all 10 of our Talons - We’ve run the robot almost continuously for hours on end climbing the tower, with no issues from the controllers… even though the Mini-CIM was hot enough to fry an egg on!

#3

What motors were the Talons controlling? (CIMs?)

#4

Yes, we were driving CIM motors. We didn’t bother with fans since the location we were testing was unheated. Ambient temperature was well below freezing.

#5

Well there’s your problem. Even if the environment around them is cold, you need to have some actual airflow in order to get rid of the heat.

#6

Just to throw it out there…we have been running talons on our drivetrain (6cims) without fans and have yet to have any problems. We are huge fans of them so far.

#7

Then you haven’t been running them without fans after all.:slight_smile:

#8

I see what you did there…

Honestly OP, why put your $15,000 season at the mercy of $4.00 fans? Just put the things on. The draw of the Talons for us is the protected internals (maybe this season we’ll make it through without losing 50% of our controllers for once…). Yet no amount of data could convince me to run the heavy load Talons without fans.

#9

Maybe if you’re using a lot of talons then you could put the large KOP fan on the robot and angle it to blow over the talons

#10

Three reasons – Weight weight weight.

When you are struggling with a bot that is almost 10lbs over the max, the concept of adding 10 fans which weigh in total well over 1lb is not well received.

#11

To reinforce the customer service of CTRE and Mike Copioli, we had a Talon fault out-of-box a week ago, and I have the replacement here in my hands already, even though I told him to “take his time” since this was a spare.

(On a related note: Also bought a Battery Beak from AM - wow, this thing is way cool!)

It is really refreshing for a company to completely understand the FRC build season and its constraints, and ramp up their service to make life less stressful.

Unlike DigiKey, which has yet to tell me what they are going to do about the 2 faulty Grayhill encoders I RMA’d to them. And I’ve been their customer for 30 years.

#12

Just one more data point: Our 'bot has 8 Talons in it with 4 driving CIMs. None have fans. They survived the Granite State Regional quite nicely.

Now if we can figure out why a very lightly loaded window motor failed in the semis…