hey guys our team needs help with our flywheel. the compounded gear ratio that drives the singular wheel is an 84 tooth to a 12 tooth and then along the same axle as the 12, a 60 to a 12. The driven gear is the 84 which has a motor either side of the axle (2 motors driving one axle). OUR PROBLEM!! Sometimes the motors and gears just lock and don’t move. Sometimes while driving the motors (393 VEX motor) slow down and give out. but sometimes it runs fine, Please help! We have been working on the same flywheel for over 3 months now. We don’t understand the problem, we have tried several different gear ratio’s, motor arrangements, anything we could. HELP!!
– i have attatched two videos in the following. one decently working but not flying the ball very well AND the other video where the motors wont budge (excuse our teammate in the background) and some photos of the gear.
@jordanhughes It looks like you have too big a gear ratio for too few motors. Right now you have 35 : 1 ratio, if your motors are on torque this would (theoretically) spin the flywheel at 3500 rpm (35 x 100rpm) or if they are speed, 5600rpm (35 x 160). The problem is that your motors are stalling out. If the motors reach a high enough internal temperature , then they will automatically shut off.
You should consider either: adding more motors to your flywheel, reducing your gear ratio, or both.
side note: compression of the flywheel itself is also very important so that will also need to be tuned in order to launch the balls with sufficient velocity.
I had the same thing happen with a 25:1 on 3 speed motors with 4 4” wheels
I changed the gearing to 35:1 on 3 speed motors still and added a ratchet and pawl mechanism …it now does fine and spins even faster
(This is a bit late, but it may be helpful to some teams.) My team had the same issue with a 50:1 gear ratio flywheel running with 3 V4 motors (now running on 2 V5 motors). We realized that it was hitting the current limit, so we had our code repeatedly run the flywheel to the speed we wanted it to run at. This seemed to overwrite the current limit. It may not be the best for the motor, but everything seems to work now.
