My team has a claw geared 3:1 with one torque motor. The claw has standoffs on the inside to grip the cones, but to move a cone, we have to run the motor the whole time we are holding a cone. Because of this, our motor burns out and we have to wait several seconds before we can grip another cone. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to not burn our motor out?
You could rubber band your claw to hold the cone in.
This is personally what I recommend because its simple and easy to implement, but unlike a holding power prevents you from overheating due to that.
Rubber banding will fix it, but if you want to have more control you should turn the power down to below 50 as the stall current is too low for it to trip the PTC. I used this method for my goliath intake and you can have a cone lodged in the intake for more than 10 minutes.
If you are running the claw at full power to hold the cone, it will burn out. You should be able to use a 1:1 ratio actually, but just run it at 25 power to hold.
No problem… but you should definitely see if you can bring the power down lower than that. At 75, the rate that the motor generates heat is going to be greater than the rate that it cools down by heat dissipation.
Ours works just fine at 20, so I think 75 is a little overkill xD
@Aponthis What do you reccomend then with a 3:1 ratio? Or should i change the ratio of the claw altogether because 3:1 seems to be more than enough?
You guys should just use Goliath, it’s better as it has better accuracy with cones, is more versatile than claws and arguably easier to build.
1:1 (direct) would be fine.