So we have a fully aluminum, elastic assisted, 4 bar, with 4 high strength motors as 5:1 gear ratio. The only thing is that they are on a y-cabel (i for each side). We would get into a match, and we were always had the cube over to the other side within 3 seconds of the match. But after lifting some in the first minute or so, our lift would start giving out (along with our drive, but we have a different plan). We switched out batteries every match, and even then they never were to much out of juice. Would it fix our problem if we did not have them on y-cables, and we plan on adding 2 more motors with the same 5:1 gear ratio.
My team has ran y splits on many different parts of our robot and they all ran perfectly fine so it can’t be that. Adding those two motors to the lift should help the problem, but what internal gearing are the lift motors using? It could also just be the towers used at competitions killing your robot. That has happened to us multiple times
My team has the exact same thing however we use the y cables on our drive becasue we realized that the lift will be consuming most of the power, so by not using any y cables on the lift it prevents it from stalling out.
It could be the cortex. We had issues with our drive dying way too soon, and a new cortex fixed it.
Though it was not a four bar, my team had a 4 motor 1:5 that we brought to a competition yesterday. It had games where it worked well but it was inconsistent as it sometimes lost power midway through the match. I think it is safe to say you need more motors than that to have a dependable lift. We used y cables on the lift as well though I honestly doubt it is the problem.
4 motor 1:5 especially on high speed will burn out within dumping a few stars. You really want 6 motors on 1:5 or just 4 motor (torque) 1:7 on the lift.
How have you divided up the motors on the two cortec ptc’s? We accidentally put all of our drive motors on one ptc and all the lift motors on the other but the drive drew more current than the lift and it caused us to overheat terribly(as in making us lose a tournament terribly).
Our lift currently consists of 2 towers with 3 motors on each side. We have two sets of them on y cables, it works fine but can skip due to the axles and gears breaking. One problem that could happen with your lift and drive is either a short circuit/ overheating. We had this problem with our drive, to fix this we made 6 spares and implemented in a motor rotation to ensure new and reliable motors.
@Andrew Chang actually there are some 1:5 lifts with 4 motors that work pretty well, provided you have enough rubber bands.
Take this one, for example