After the success of my previous release, [v5 motor cartridges internal gearing release], I have returned to help vexU teams further expand the capabilities of custom v5 cartridges.
I have created example solutions for a 400rpm, 1200rpm, and 3600rpm v5 motor cartridge.
These can be found on my grabCad page at: vexU-400rpm-1200rpm-3600rpm-cartridges
Please note: this is only legal for vexU, and these cartridges are intentionally left un-optimized, I am leaving it up to the teams to figure out how to optimize these for their desired manufacturing process. These are only intended to be used as reference to help vexU teams make their own solutions for customized motor cartridges.
The file “gear lock.ipt” fits over the first stage of the vex motor cartridge and can be used to easily create a a 1200rpm or 3600rpm cart. This works by locking the first stage of the cartridge making
the final ratio only dictated by the top reduction stage.
The file “gear sleeve.ipt” is a configurable inventor ipart that can be used to change the bottom stage of a motor cartridge along with my previously released mid section ipart.
Furthermore, I have created a python program to standardize custom motor cap colors.
This can be found at my github under: Cap-Color
This python program will convert the desired motor rpm into a standardized color along the rainbow scale for use in marking the v5 motor cap rpm.
To make this program I first used excel to plot the seven known RGB values of the rainbow scale and extracted the formulas for the best it lines for red blue and green separately.
I input these formulas into python and created a slider to go through them. This enabled me to obtain the approximate rgb values for the existing 200 and 600 rpm cartridges based on a visual comparison.
Next, in excel I plotted motor rpm at each of the known points (100, 200, 600, and 3600 rpm). Because of the complex nature of the data, I created a piece wise function breaking the data into 3 distinct regions, using a best fit line for the data in the middle. I then took these equations and by setting them equal at the end points I obtained a continuous piece wise function.
Once I had all these equations, I input them into my python program to convert from rpm to the cap rgb color. The full source code is available for download on my GitHub previously linked.