Speed controllers

[antrock101]

I'v noticed servos as drive are not the norm anymore, I was wondering what people were using for cheap speed controllers, I saw the sabertooths but they are way outside my price range.

[joey_picus]

Rory's NanoTwo controllers (or "Roryboards" to people like me who are rubbish at names!) are used in an awful lot of ants now - this is largely because they are really good but also because you can get them as a small package soldered to a Lemon DSM2 reciever which weighs about 5g and takes up very little space. (Before these, Peter Waller made his own speed controllers and sold them on what was officially a one-off prototype basis - which were excellent and I still have a lot of them waiting to go into robots! Before then, there were Scorpion Minis/HXes and Sozbots, which were American and usually quite bulky)

Most of the other practical options are single-channel only - I've mentioned the Fingertechs and BotBitz before. In the case of the latter, they're based on publicly available (somewhere!) firmware that can be used to hack cheap brushless speed controllers from the likes of Hobbyking and turn them into reversible brushed controllers, so if you're really short of money that's an option - as is the standby of servo boards with resistors...

A slightly less conventional option is the DT series of *really* tiny DSM2 recievers and speed controllers all in one board. The lower voltage options are extremely good for nanoweights, but Scott's not had much luck with the higher voltage boards (which are designed for small r/c cars, and have the acceleration ramps tailored accordingly - on a robot this means lots of drifting over the edge of the arena...)

[Rapidrory]

The datasheet for the NanoTwo kits is here, to save you flicking through my dev log: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1feH ... sp=sharing