Even though the Talons sounded very tempting with their sealed form factor and mostly passive cooling, I was adamant about not using them in 2013 since they were new, and I had no idea how well they’d hold up.
Early adopters of the talons, hold-outs, opponents and proponents: as the season nears it’s climax, where do you stand on the talons now?
Have they proven their mettle? have they earned you respect? and the ultimate test: will you use them in 2014?
At GTRE very few teams were using anything but talons. The only big team not using talons that I saw was 1114 who only used victors as they are sponsored by IFI (I was told this by a team member).
While not applicable to FIRST I love that talons can take up to 28 volts and have a higher update rate than victors. We will continue to use them for the foreseeable future.
We used the new Victor 888’s exclusively and are very pleased with their performance.
Not so pleased with our performance this season, but the Victors played no role in that.
We’ll continue using Victor 888’s in future seasons.
–Michael Blake
Talons 100%. No issue at all with them, and the space saving was huge compared to Victors and (moreso) Jags. Unless you are sponsored by IFI, have a very large stockpile of Victors/Jags, or if you are using CAN, I don’t see why anyone would use anything but Talons in the future.
We used 10 talons on our robot, and they worked beautifully. One did stop working halfway through a regional… We didn’t have time to troubleshoot so we swapped it quickly. I think it might have just been a loose connection, but we won’t know until we get the robot out of the bag (MN State competition May 18) and have some time to hook it up and test.
Overall, I think they performed great!
We (Team 1540) used Talons this year and were extremely happy with their performance. Because of the new size restrictions (54" cylinder) we had to minimize the space used for control systems (electrical). In previous years, we had used Jaguars over Victors due to reliability, but this year we found the Talons were as reliable as Jaguars but with the surface area (about) of a Victor. This helped so much to cut down the size of the control board, which was extremely beneficial this year.
The update rate really doesn’t matter if you are running code slower than the update rate you are running (e.g. we run our code at the relatively fast rate of 10ms/iteration, so the standard Victor update rate of 10.1ms vs a Jaguar or Talon at 5.05ms would make no difference)
I also played with (psudo-accidentally) updating the Victor 884’s at 5.05ms and it worked fine. The new 888’s appear to be spec’d down to 2.1ms cycle time (with a max pulse width of 2ms) but using a cycle time that isn’t a multiple of 5.05ms requires some additional timing calculations (it’s not hard, if I were to try to run my code at 7ms and update the PWMs at 3.5ms it would be possible).
BUT since the code still calculates the pulse width at 10ms the update frequency doesn’t matter at all below that. In fact, the default code updates at somewhere around 20ms in the main loop in LabVIEW (not exactly sure, it’s not timed well) so the 10.1ms vs 5.05ms update rate wouldn’t affect anything.
We ran Talons on our test chassis in late December without fans and were so happy we ran them on all of our 2013 motors (there are 11 on our robot) without any fans.
Edit: I see absolutely no reasons to use a Jaguar in FRC. The reliability history is poor (in my time on 33 we’ve blown ~3x more Jaguars than Victors, yet used ~6x more Victors on robots), although the changes by IFI should help that, the CAN implementation is poor (synchronous blocking) and increases single point failures, and they’re freaking huge.
The “standard” update rate of the Talon driver in WPILib is 10ms not 5.
At least it is in the 12/20/2012 version of Talon.java.
Not sure what your experiences have been with victors. I have used jaguars from 2010-2012, and victors from 2002 to about 2009. i am pretty sure I had more broken jaguars in 3 years then all my years of using victors.
I finally went back to victor this year and I really like the 888s this year. I will have to try the talons this summer.
Testing of the controllers showed that Jaguars have a better curve on output, which convinced us to use jaguars for our drive motors, but we will continue to use victors for all other control.
Unlike many new products, we didn’t encounter any “gotchas” this season using 100% Talons (not the SRs, the original version) in fanless operation. We’re running a total of nine motors each on both our practice bot and competition bot (WCD with two CIMs each side, everything else RS-550s). In two regionals and lots of driver practices so far we’ve encountered no issues that weren’t of our own making. We took the risk because we had sufficient inventory of Victors we could fall back on if necessary; it was not.
Does anyone have any experience with directly comparing the Talon and the Victor 888? I know a lot of teams went from 884s to Talons, but I am interested to hear if people have tried both new speed controllers and found major advantages or disadvantages in one type.
We used 888s on our drive and 884s elsewhere, extremely satisfied with the performance of the 888s.
As of now, only the Jags have CAN capability, which we utilize for more than just setting he output voltage.
Therefore, Jags
Better than what? What kind of testing?
(My emphasis)
If you are careful about avoiding metal shavings raining down on the Jags, I’m not sure they are any less reliable than some lots of Digital Sidecars.
The DSC is also a single point of failure and disables all PWM controlled motors, whereas with a daisy chained CAN bus you may have several motors operational before the cabling failure point.
However I don’t argue with your other points about size & CAN blocking implementation.
Not the way we’ve managed to break them. The just lose a channel or two.
I would just like to make it clear that, while we are extremely thankful for the support of IFI, we would use Victors either way.
Year after year they have proven to be a reliable and robust component of our robots.
I would do to our remaining jags what they will eventually do to themselves and burn them, if the students would let me… 
We used only Victor 888s and we were very pleased. Other than some slight issues when using “y” PWMs on drivetrain Victors, everything went very well. They are very robust and we haven’t had to replace a single one yet (through 2 regionals and lots of practice). I would like to run talons for next year, game permitting (need of PID loops for shooter wheels or whatnot in an instance where very linear response is necessary).
We used a combination of Talons and Jaguars this year. I was very impressed with the Talons’ resilience; we lost connection one match and ran into a wall, stall all 4 CIMs for the remainder of the match. One talon burned, but the rest were undamaged.It was later determined that the burned talon was due to a wiring fault.
We will probably use Talons for all drive motors in the future, and Jaguars for sensor-based or precision applications.