Our robot uses a flywheel system with 4 motors on it. Before we put it on the robot, it worked perfectly as a separated subsystem. Once we put it on the robot, though, with no changes to it, it immediately started stalling out. Is anyone able to help?
I can see multiple scenarios that could cause this problem:
- You could possibly be mounting the flywheel on a mount that would potentially bend the flywheel gearbox structure.
- You aren’t putting your flywheel on a PTC location that isn’t overused. The PTC locations are: All ports on the battery expander share 1 PTC, the ports 1-5 on the CORTEX share one PTC and ports 6-10 share another PTC. Make sure the flywheel is either distributed upon all of the PTC’s or the flywheel only uses one PTC without any other subsystem using it.
- Your Robot batteries may not be charged. Make sure that the batteries are as charged as possible. This could potentially make a difference with motor burnouts (in my experience)
The list continues but here’s what I believe you should put an emphasis on. I have more scenarios that could cause this problem so if these don’t fix the problem I can bring more up.
What Conner said plus make sure your motor wiring remained the same. If wires got switched around, it’s possible a motor is trying to run backwards against the others.
We sized the rest of the design to the flywheel/intake system so I don’t think that could be it.
The motors are in 4,5,6,and 9, so they are evenly split.
The batteries were charged overnight and were full when I put them on the robot. Also, the motors are run through our power expander, so the four of them are the only ones on the battery.
We took apart the motors to look at them and realized that some of them were missing an O-ring where the gear that holds the axle goes, we are making sure that they are in all the motors. We will update soon. In the meantime, more suggestions would always be appreciated.
@Lord_Jrome When I had a really janky flywheel during NbN, it stalled out if we didn’t do a “shaft reset” before the next match, where we basically took out the output shafts to the flywheel and then reinstalled them, with no other modifications. I think the issue was that the shafts were either flexing when run, and had to be removed to “rest” or whatever, or there was a little bit of friction on the output drive shafts.
I would suggest replacing the shafts with ones that you know are straight, and play with the mounting on the flywheel itself to make sure there isn’t any friction where it shouldn’t be. That’s my experience, at least.