i need some help deciding on a good gear ratio for a 6 motor drive. our robot right now has a 4 motor 257rpm drive on 4" wheels, however it overheats frequently and could have a bit more pushing power. now my question is, should we keep this drivetrain and stack 2 more motors on top of the gears, or switch to a new drivetrain ratio with smaller wheels?
Depends on what tou want from yor bot. If yoy luke the current speed but just want more acceleration and more torque stack 2 otors. If you want to go faster change you dt. If you want a lower cog and more conpact drive pods switch to smaller wheels.
257 is below average speed, above average pushing power, and shouldn’t overheat. The two things that I can think of are that your base is built with high friction which can just be tested by isolating individual wheels and seeing if they frespin on the axel. You want several seconds of spin on the wheel while not connected on everything and if you have that friction isn’t your problem. Alternatively your expectations are too high, your base needs to be able to make it through basically just a minute and 45 seconds of use so if you are testing for a long time it isn’t going to work for enough time
I wouldn’t add more motors because that would limit the amout of motors you can use for things other than driving, so I would recomend that you either set the motor torque to the most or change the gear ratio to a closer numbers than you have now.
This post has a list of a bunch of drivetrain layouts and their pros/cons:
6 motor drives are very common among higher-level teams, because you often don’t need more then 2 motors for the rest of your robot (assuming you have access to pneumatics). For example in this year’s game, a lot of teams have a 6 motor drive, 1 motor intake, and a 1 motor shooter, with all of the rest of the mechanisms on the robot powered by pneumatics.
The motors are automatically at the highest torque, the torque function can only lower it