Hi there, I have a few questions regarding the funtionality of my robot. My class is currently in the robotics unit and we have completely assembled the robots and have had them working perfectly for some time now.
However, just this week, my groups robot has for the most part become disfuntional. One of the main problems that we believe to be the cause here is our battery. As soon as we plug it in to the robot and run it, after about 10 seconds, the “ROBOT” and we eventually don’t have enough power to run the motors.
Heres what we have tried to solve the problem:
We have tried 3 different batteries; the “ROBOT” light still turned red
We have swapped out the Cortex Microcontrollers (nothing changed)
We have swapped out the driving motors (nothing happened)
We currently modified our robot for racing. The frustrating part was that before the modification, we had 5 motors attached: one for the claw, one for the arm, one for a lever that kicked a ball out of the arm, then two for the wheels. Everything was working flawlessly with all of this on there. Then, we take all of that off and only leave 2 motors for the wheels and now it doesnt work…
If anyone could possibly give me some ideas that my group could try to solve this problem, it would be much appreciated.
Also, if I need to post anymore information on the robot, please dont hesitate to ask. I’ll do it ASAP.
The motors are plugged in the correct spots as far as im concerned. The robot will drive forward, only for about 10 seconds before the left motor dies out on us.
I’m not a guru on this stuff, so when you say “for the protection to kick in”, what do you mean? It’s probably something very simple, I’ve just never leanred it.
I’m not by the robot right now, I’ll have to check. I believe they are two wire motors because we were using an adapter to plug it in to the microcontroller. Which would you recommend using for speed?
We have a 1:7 gear ratio going on right now with no gears on the front wheels. So it’s a rear wheel drive robot. I don’t see that being a problem. Do you?
Thank you! So by having such a ratio you think it’s causing the battery to burn out? That would actually make sense considering we changed the gear ratio when we modified it. And before it was working quite well with the ratio it had.
I’ll try changing it back tomorrow morning and post whether or not that was the exact cause.
Thank you guys for all your help. It’s much appreciated.