Hey guys,
The past couple of years working with Vex’s motors (2-wire and 3-wire) Ive always seen a problem with motors over heating. Of course our competition robot’s motors over heat because of stress during competition, but I’ve also seen it in our class robots which are much smaller and much lighter than our competitions…
Do the motors actually “overheat” and stop working or is this a different problem?
Is there a way to fix this if the motors do actually overheat?
We don’t usually change the motors internal gear ratio but we do usually set all of our motors to 127 or -127 in the programming. Does it actually help to change the internal gear ratio to high torque? or does that put it under more stress?
Of course I’ve been curious because we just had our first competition of the season and we were very disappointed to see a non moving robot not even halfway through the competition where everyone else’s robots are much bigger and much heavier than ours and they still work…
Obviously this could be a building flaw of mine, but if anyone has some tips to avoid this problem it would be much appreciated…
If you search the vexforums for “motor overheating” you will find a plethora of threads talking about the issue; read through a couple of them.
If you post pictures of your design and give us some details about it (ie 1:2 gear ratio, 4 393s on the drive, …) then folks could point out potential flaws with it.
The thread is here, the discussion was about estimating motor current, there were several others on the same topic that came after this one as we were developing the model that was eventually used in the ROBOTC smart motor library.