Hitec Updates and servo price drop

[tempusmaster]

From what I gather, the 5498SG's are totally swappable w/ the 8498HB's std. on the RN-1. The 5990's are ment to replace any 5995's for full catch-n-play support.

Looking at the specs, though, the 5990s have less torque and are slightly slower than the 5995s......

In Sumi-san's ROBO-ONE 10 post he says "HSR-5990TG felt more forceful compared with the conventional 5995TG(s)." (my translation from the Japanese)

Of course, it's totally subjective and very application dependent. He made a lot of changes to Arius for this competition including changing the knee design to double servos and eliminating the 'tiptoe' axis, so his comment isn't an apples to apples comparision.

[tempusmaster]

I can live with steel gears but titanium would be cooler

Amen at that... anything more durable than the "Karbonite" sounds good to me

The pre-release servos Sumi-san is using are 'TG'.

[bauermech]

The pre-release servos Sumi-san is using are 'TG'

Yeah, the 5990's are TG (Titanium), and the 5498's are SG (Steel). I could see mostly the 5990's in Sumi-san's bot. Don't know if any 5498's were used. I had a very short time to check Arius out in the elevator... he just finished a round and had to get ready for the next.

I assume that the 5498's gear-sets could be swapped with the 5990's the same the 8498's can be swapped with the 5995's (with some modification of course... the unmodified TG's will ultimately increase the height of the 8498 servo by about .5mm+, just enough to NOT be able to fit in a std. RN-1 bracket).

[bauermech]

Looking at the specs, though, the 5990s have less torque and are slightly slower than the 5995s......

I believe the torque is the same (30kg.cm @ 7.4v / 24kg.cm @ 6v), but yeah, they're a bit slower (.14 @ 7.4v / .17 @ 6v) ...but they're programable and support catch-n-play There's also the 5980SG, same as 5990, but minus the heat sink and TG's are replaced w/ SG's... lower cost. The 5650SG's have the same casings as the 59 series', but with nearly the same innards as the 5498's (but a little slower).
The 5498's are your true RN-1 replacements (well, we'll see once we can get ahold of some). They will operate at both 6v and 7.4v... meaning we won't have as much trouble running Li-Poly's! Their torque is 11kg.cm @ 6v / 13.5kg.cm @ 7.4, with a speed of .22 @ 6v / .19 @ 7.4. Nice!

The only beef I could possibly have with these is with their rotation. Not sure, but I don't think they've increased the range past 180deg. Some of the other brands are meeting the 260deg mark. That support would probably entail making changes to RoboBASIC app to use integers instead of bytes, but could also mean they could bump the resolution up quite a bit as well.... and those of you hacking the AVR who are waiting for a software upgrade to gain access to the bootlader would be happy too!