We were building our flywheel, and we managed to get a 0% loss in rpm, but it still burns out during just tuning PID (running it without load). Does anyone have suggestions to help? So far we used lubricant and there are steel washers on everything, except for spacing. We recently added a ratchet to help, but that did not do much for us.
EDIT: Attached pictures.
@NyQuil what is the internal gear ratio of the flywheel motor?
It kind of looks like your wheel is touching the right standoff which holds the hood; this could cause a lot of friction and stall out the motor. It could also be your PID code oscillating the power of the motor too much, try running the motor in the brains devices menu.
How are you measuring rpm? There is no encoder and multiplying the motors internal rpm by the gear ratio may not give you the actual rpm of the flywheel.
Its internals are geared for 600RPM. The 0% loss is more of an approximation, its probably around 4 or 5% all said. The wheel wasn’t touching during testing, we were working with the ratchet. You could be right about the PID, it was not tuned well at all.
Unless some gears are slipping or similar, working from the internal rpm reading and applying the gear ratio should do quite well. It’s always a little off during acceleration due to some flexing, but outside that transient issue things should be fine. Of course, no loss of rpm isn’t something so exciting. You really want to look at the torque ratio to know how lossy the system is.
the spacing between the towers holding the flywheel seems a bit large, axle might be flexing if weight isnt perfectly distributed on the flywheel
Looks like the axle(s) holding the pinions might be too densely packed together. Make sure there’s a little bit of play; try replacing one of the spacers with a series of washers.
Same for the big gears directly driven by the motors.
My team was having a similar issue. If I understand correctly, your flywheel might be reaching the current limit. Try adjusting your code to make it repeatedly set the speed to the desired amount. This overwrote the current limit for us, and now our flywheel works.