I had heard that when you connect red to black instead of red to red from a 2-wire motor into a motor controller that it reverses the direction in which the motor spins.
After testing this I see that it is definitely true. My question is, does this do anything to negatively affect either the motor or the motor controller?
Say I needed to motors to go in opposite directions but I wanted them attached to a Y-Cable. Could I put one motor into its motor controller red to red and the other red to black and then connect both motor controllers to the same Y-Cable?
I am assuming this configuration is fine but I would prefer to know nothing will go wrong simply because I plugged the cable in the opposite way.
Plugging the two wire motors in backwards into the motor controllers has no negative effects. The two wire motors are regular motors, not servo motors like the three wire ones, so if you switch the direction of current, the motor simply reverses direction.
It’s a neat trick while prototyping, but before competition, I urge you to make all of your connections the same (red to red) so that if you have to swap the motor in competition you plug it in the right way.
I agree. I always make sure that instead we program the robot accordingly before the competition, so that swapping motors will be easy and not a complicated process. However in the case jumper11 gave above, using a “Y-Cable,” the only way to switch the direction of only one of the motors would be to use Motor Controller 29’s and flip the one motor’s connector to be red-to-black and black-to-red.
We would prefer to leave those two motors Y-cabled until we get 2 more 269 motors (we had a couple die) to put on our drive train instead of 3-wires. Once we get those we can move the Y-cables to the drive train and connect the other motors red to red.
We will most likely have it plugged in red to black at our next competition (Haverford Robotics Gateway Event on July 23rd). But we’ll be careful not to switch it. I’ll be one of the two team members out of our five who will be there so I should be able to keep a close eye on it. Thanks for your concern though.
