Is using a two motor drivetrain with the motors powering gears in the middle that turn the front and back wheels at the same time a bad idea? Out team is still in the early stages of building so we want to know if we should keep our current design or change it and use a four motor drive instead. Does anyone have any advice on this? Thanks!
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While it is a good thought, I don’t think it would help you in the long run only having two motors. Running 4 wheels with two motors makes the motors have to work a lot harder, which means that if you want a stable drivetrain, you would have to put the red transmissions with the most torque in the motors. (Which in turn also makes them slower) I would recommend doing a 4 motor drivetrain for stability and speed. Then you have plenty of other motors to use for the other mechanisms in your robot. Good luck this season!
Payne Stroud
Team 39232
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2 motor drive in VRC is always a bad idea. 4 motrs is the bare minimum, (2 motors on each side). If you run a 2 motor drive you will have to run a supwr torquey ratio so that your drive motors dont over heat. This means that you robot is gonna e really slow and u will have trouble keeping up with other robots on the feilds. 4 motor drive makes it so that you can run the robot at like 46-57 in/s withought having to worry about over heat. Especially since 6m drives are the meta a 2m and mabey even a 4m drive eobot might have a hard time keeping up with the speed and power of 6m drves
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I would definitely recommend at least four motors (44W) on your drive. If you are having trouble figuring out how to make your drive, I would start here. It is a great resource for teams starting out.
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what about a six motor drive tho on a robot that’s also tryna somehow have a catapult and an intake and elevation
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That’s what motor sharing is for. There are many ways to do this, one of them being a pneumatic switching the position of a gear by pushing it off of the one it is meshed with and onto another.
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Motor sharing, PTOs, just using pneumatic cylinders.
Many many ways to work around it.
Yeah, as @Some_random_person and @15545G-SC have said, there are ways to make a strong drivetrain with only 4 motors, but any less, you are losing stability in your drivetrain. I would recommend 4 motors.
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I will say that 2 motors will make it work harder… plus you have to take the extra time to add sprockets and the chains that connect to the sprockets, and it’s a little less stable. So I would definitely say @javaskrypt gave some good advice to you and so did @Some_random_person
Hope this helps!
C. Rhineheart
9545C Team
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I don’t think you’ll see many 2 motor drivetrains this year. Does that automatically mean its a bad idea? I guess it depends on what your going to do with those extra motors to make up for limitations in your drive train. I think we’re going to see a lot of 6 motor drive trains this year. Speed, power, getting over the center bar are all going to be big this year.
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