Do motors generally burn out on clawbots?

VEX V5 General Discussion Technical Discussion
1

I made a claw with gear ratio 1:5 (i don’t know if this is relevant)

My senior told me that claws can be risky because moving the motors back and forth at full speed will stall/burn out the motors in a few minutes. Neither of us have made claws before (this will be my first time), and I haven’t tested mine yet. I want to learn more about how successful claws work. ie: is it true?

do I program claws differently from how people would normally program a drive?

thanks

2

What our team did was to have another button just for holding onto stuff. So one button would move the motors at full speed to grab it, and then we’ll use the other button with lowered power just to hold onto it. We’ve had no burn outs yet.

3

You could also use a potentiometer and use PID to hold the claw closed so it is only running the motor when it begins opening up. You could use some basic if statements and only the run the motors a certain speed if it is opened too much and the designated button is pressed. About the claws, they will burn out if you keep the motor running fully when it is already closed around an object (this happened to us in Skyrise), but there are many ways to avoid this like what I just described or what jedi22300-813A said.

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