Ive never built a robot that has used more than 10 motors, until now, and im clueless on what to do. I heard its called “y-ing” a motor. i dont know… thanks in advance. an attached program file would be helpful! thanks!
Hi Thomas,
To use all 12 motors, you need to use exactly what you said, ‘Y-ing’. That is when you use a Y cable to link together two motors on one port. Say you had a lift that had two motors working together. In that situation, you might want to use a Y cable to ‘link’ those two motors onto one port. But make sure that you only link motors that work with each other on a Y.
You need a Y-cable to connect the two motors. once you have that, programming it is the same as any other motors. Plug the Y-cable into a port, send power to the port and both connected motors will turn.
Note: you can not control each motor individually from a y-cable
However, it isn’t as simple as controlling two motors with one port… I’ve used y cables for a long time. Y cables split the power sent to the motors. I don’t know what factor (maybe half because it is one line going out in two). Every time I use them, I get motor stalling issues where it seems the motors y cabled are not getting the full values I specified. Maybe I’m just seeing things or my y cables just happened to be the only y cables to be broken. If my info is true though, a solution is y cabling from the cortex to a power expander, where two motors going into the power expander except there input comes from one port. The y cable only sends a signal to indicate the power expander how much power to give (that’s my theory of course and it makes sense, but just like everything else it might be wrong). Or maybe the power expander is giving a little extra power to accommodate the loss of power previously mentioned before. This post might be useless because I don’t even give confirmed info, but I hope you are a little weary of using these things. They are very helpful, but it doesn’t hurt to learn a little more about how they actually work.
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Just have the y cables attached to motors that are doing the same thing at the same time, like one side of a drive. Then just code it like “LeftDrive” instead of the individual motors.