For those who don’t know, the Venom (from Playing With Fusion) “is a brushed DC motor based on the original 2.5” CIM used by FIRST Robotics Competition teams for the past 18 years. The traditional CIM is a “dumb” motor, requiring a suite of external controllers and sensors. Venom integrates all of these functions into a single, compact package".
For the teams that chose the Venom motors for this season, I have 2 main questions:
Why did you choose the Venom motor over other options?
How was your experience compared to other motors that you have used?
If you aren’t open to sharing on a public thread like this, feel free to DM me.
Honestly I had no idea that it was even a motor option until after I opened the thread and had to go read the manual again to check if it was legal. From what I can tell, is it just a CIM with “better” system integration? Seemed like it had more or less equal performance with a regular CIM, or maybe marginally increased performance because of the ball bearings rather than bushings.
Yeah, not the best market timing on this product. If they’d brought it out three or four years ago, it could have been big, but now it’s just an also-ran. Especially at the price-point they have. Why spend this money for the same functionality as your existing CIMs and controllers, or why not spend the extra $20 and get a Falcon (or about the same and get a Neo/Spark Max combo)?
I think you weren’t the only one to forget they existed, and with good reason.
From a marketing perspective, they had an interesting launch time, especially being right around the Falcon 500 launch and the general rise of brushless motors. This lead me to wonder if any teams actually used them, like @troy_dietz hinted at.
I didn’t either. I read through the manual 3 or 4 times and never even noticed these in the allowed motor chart. I’d be really interested to see how much of the FRC community even knew about these things. I saw zero marketing and I don’t recall any discussion about them here either.
There was a post on them, it just happened to be the same day that the Falcon 500 and Neo 550 were announced, so it kinda flew under the radar for many.
I knew about them, but agree that they didn’t seem to offer any benefits over other options. I did not notice any on the robots I inspected or otherwise browsed at Arkansas Regional.
We actually used two Venoms on our drivetrain since we needed a replacement for two of the older CIMs on our Toughbox Minis. We had the Venoms lying around so we decided to try those out.
Overall, I don’t know if we saw any obvious performance gains using the Venoms. Functionally, however, it was nice to not have to use a separate motor controller. The in-built motor controller worked fine for everything we did. We did have to use the CANstar 2-Drop to connect the Venoms to CAN, but that was a relatively seamless process as well.
One thing I will mention is that it seemed like the encoders weren’t measuring very consistently. Not sure if this was due to fact that there was gearing and maybe some backlash between the encoder and the shaft. Something interesting to note is that the PwFusion software library gives encoder position in rotations rather than counts or ticks. For feedback, we would probably just use an external encoder anyways.
No, he means Venom. The whole point of the Venom was to attach a motor controller and encoder to a CIM to make it easier for teams to access closed-loop control and current sensing.
