Our team found out that the problem we were having with our robot was that the circut breaker was triping when we stalled (normaly after raming). We have all 393’s on the wheel base and their stall current is 3.6 amps. We know that the power expander has 1 4-amp circut breaker and the brain has 2 breakers. How can we elimnate the problem that the breaker trips so we don’t waste the match waiting for the breaker to reset over and over?
One of the members was also wondering why the motor controllers have a 3 amp motor stall and the 393’s have a 3.6 stall curent.
I would recommend you to connect half of your wheel base/ drive motors on ports 1-5 and the other half in ports 6-10.
This will evenly spread the load on your Cortex and decrease your possibilities of tripping one of the circuit breakers.
The 3A listed under the technical specifications for the Motor Controller 29, is referring to the maximum current, not stall current.
The Motor Controller 29 does not have internal current limiting.
The Motor Controller 29 can provide plenty more current than this, but it will blow up at some point (no internal current protection).
The “usable” current of the 2-wire motor controller 29 is actually more like 4 amps, 3 amps is a conservative “safe” number someone put on a spec sheet before we ever had a 393 motor, and before we did extensive testing.
We will certify it up to 4 amps (we’ve done extensive testing at this level).
I’ll get the specs updated. Thanks for pointing out this discrepancy.