And by “appropriate”, for SPARKs the answer is #10 hardware. We bought some threaded rod and unthreaded nylon spacers to stack ours up since this will be one very compact robot!
Using small zip ties also works well. You need to drill a pair of holes in your electrical panel for each zip tie.
i love that the Sparks have ports for limit switches. why pay 90 bucks for a SRX and then another 15 bucks for a breakout board. just to do the same with a $40 Spark. doesn’t get much easier and inexpensive than that.
The extra money you have to shell out for the SRX is not paying for limit switch support.
Correct you have to buy a break out board such as something like this:http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-3281.htm
We haven’t used sparks as long as I have been on the team, but this year we’re using a combination of Talon SRX’s and Victor SPX’s. They’re both CAN, but the talons can handle the input from the encoders, as others have said. In places where we don’t need encoders, we use the Victors since they’re cheaper but seem to work just as well.
If you use Mag Encoders then they have the limit switch pins broken out already. Mag Encoders are significantly more cheap and robust than any other encoder, excepting the $20 AMT-102/103 series. The savings from using a mag encoder offset the cost of using a Talon at least $10 over any other controller/encoder combo.
The purpose of an srx isnt to have limit switch support over a spark. Its to have fancy integrated and easy to use libraries such as motion profiling, motion magic, etc etc etc. I could go on for days why they are amazing.
If your only purpose for a motor controller is to have simple voltage control, and limit switch support then yes the spark is a good choice, but to do anything else, the SRX is much more useful and well worth its price.
We never did a white paper. It was on our now-defunct and being reinstated web page. At the time we had temp data, time, input and output current for the old Victor, the 888, the old talon, the spark, and the newer talon.
Temps were shot on the external heatsink with a IR temp gage.
Hopefully we can put our web page back together, though I think you’re right about the white paper. Maybe I’ll do it again once the season is over. The kids always enjoy releasing magic smoke from things.