Our team has been having a problem where our robot would randomly stop working and reset. However, the cortex and joystick lights stay green the entire time. I’ve noticed that this mostly occurs when the robot is using a lot of power (for example lifting 3 cubes and driving at the same time). We have an LCD attached for autonomous selection and a power expander for our lift.
Any ideas of how to prevent this disconnection?
Make sure you have your drive and lift spread across the cortex because ports 1-5 and 6-10 will shut off if to much power is being pulled from them ( for example if you have your drive and lift in ports 1-6 you should spread it to 1-3 and 7-10 to not over load the cortex)
I also would recommend you put either all your drive or all your lift onto a power expander if you have one available so it runs off its own battery
Do you have a back up 9V battery plugged in? This will keep you connected and the lights green even if you disconnect the main battery. This is probably still poor connection between your battery and the cortex.
we only use our 9V’s at competition. is there anyway to secure our battery though?
@TerminatorTech are you using intergrated motor encoder by chance
There are only 4 on our drivetrain. it’s probably worth mentioning that we have a holonomic drive.
We had an issue where our robots would stop moving because static would build up in our encoders I recommend in plugging the encoders from the brain and check if anything changes
To secure your battery, make sure you use the battery extension cable. That really helps a lot with this.
We have our lift plugged into a power expander, and our motors are spread out along our cortex. (we have 2 drive motors in 1 and 2 and two others in 9 and 10). But our robot is still having problems.
Hey, sorry to interrupt from the question, but I kind of got distracted of “lifting 3 cubes and driving at the same time.” “How much can you even lift?” “Does anyone even lift other than you, bro?”
First thing, I may question some things… Since the robot will still be connected to the Controller, I don’t think it’s a “disconnect issue.” I think that the motors may be potentially having a fuze breaking on them, since you said “motors are using a lot of power.” Try adding more rubber bands to your lift if possible, and if not add more motors. If this doesn’t fix the issue or you can’t do it, make the lift be connected to the expander and not the CORTEX. The CORTEX shouldn’t be connected to motors under heavy load, since you may cause a malfunction of some sort.
Sorry about that, what I meant was we can lift around 3-4 stars and drive at the same time. we also have a hanging lift but that’s another story.
Our lift is connected to the power expander (along with our hanging lift) and our holonomic drive is on our cortex. we tried to spread out our motors as much as possible but we are using a maximum of 12 motors. we even have 6 rubber bands to help with our fork lift (3 on each side).
I’d still suggest more rubber bands. There are different types and each band is different, which means some have more elasticity than others. Just add more and more until it works, or maybe change your gear ratio. What’s your lift gear ratio?
Its a 5:1 gear ratio (12T to 60T) and we are using the high strength gears.
The way we got around a batery problem like that was we ran a cable tie between the red and black wires in the connector and up to the top of the cortex and tightening. Basically we zip tied the batery to the cortex
Our problem is not our battery, we keep on tripping the internal PTC. How do we stop this from happening?