V5 Motor Power and Rubber Bands

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
#1

VEX V5 motors are much more powerful than previous VEX motors, but even they are not infinitely powerful. They are, however, able to give programmers a lot of information on what is going on in the motor. We wanted to test the hypothesis that adding rubber bands to an arm can significantly reduce the work done by a motor, and both reduce power consumption and increase motor life.

We used our V5 Clawbot to graph the power usage of the arm motor with and without rubber bands and with and without weight. Here is one of our power usage charts, which maps motor current against arm angle (where zero degrees is the arm starting position):

Click this link to read the entire article about our testing.

#2

Unsurprising but useful results, thank you for writing this up!

By the way, have you done any testing in terms of the actual power output of a v5 motor as compared to a 393 motor? How many times more powerful is a v5 motor? I know the vex website lists the peak and continuous power outputs of a 393 but there can be a lot of reasons for motors to under or over perform the stated power output.

Thanks!

#3