I was just wondering, what would be more effective: a 4 motor drive or 2 motor drive( V5) in Turning Point?The 4 motor drive allows for speed and power for platform wrestling, but doesn’t give you much motors for your lift, claw and or shooter. While the 2 motor drive has less power and speed, but gives you 2 extra motors for your lift, claw, and shooter. I understand that each drive has its own advantages and disadvantages, but which one would you choose?
I would recommend doing a two motor base because you will need the extra motors for everything else. Also, what is the point (other than defense) in having a fast base if you cant do anything else?
@7517H
There is no ideal number, but there are valid justifications for a 4m v5 base. If you look at past seasons there were numerous robots which had 6 motors drives such as our own robot and the skills and world champions, 5225a, to name a few. A common misconception is that adding more motors means a huge increase in speed. If your drive works well with 2m v5 adding two more v5 motors will not increase the free max speed, however it wil increase the available torque. Having more torque means without any more changes, the robot will accelerate faster than before. Also, having more torque will mean that you have the option to use a faster driver ratio. (In past seasons 4m HS was about the same as 6m turbo) on the other hand you could keep the same ratio and use the power of 4m v5 for defense as you mentioned earlier. Now that the merits of 4m v5 has been discussed, I’ll go back to the example of robots with 6 drive motors from past seasons. The max number of motors allowed was 12 — meaning teams were using half of their allotted motors for their drive alone. This season, the rules impose a limit of 8 v5 motors, half of that being 4. What we can see from this is that 4m v5 is not a waste of motors, but more similar to choosing between 4 or 6 motors on your base in previous seasons. With that being said, I’m interested in seeing a 3 motor non-holonomic base, because that roughly translates to the torque of 6 (v4?) motors.
To answer your question in short, it’s really up to your preferences and you should test both out.
Though mathematically, this works out, 4 v5 motors is not at all the same commitment as 6 393’s. Let’s say you use 6 393’s for your drive this year, that leaves you with a one motor linear puncher, a one motor claw, a one motor ball intake, a one motor cap flipper, and a two motor lift. you have just the right amount of motors to make the appropriate subsystems functional (not necessarily efficient) . With a 4v5 motor drive, you would need to figure out how to power all of these systems with only 4 motors. If you only had two or three mechanisms like last year, dedicating half of the motors to the drive would be roughly the same whether you’re using 393’s or v5’s, but due to the dramatic increase in motor scarcity when using v5 motors, it’s going to be much more important to do whatever you can with the least amount of motors possible.
I guarantee anitchamber will find us a way to use one motor to both grab caps and flip them.
A passive cap intake should do the trick
Agreed. We’ve already prototyped one, though our cap hasn’t been 3d printed yet so we haven’t been able to test it.
To have one motor both grab and flip the caps you just need an arm with a passive intake like the ones used in sky rise on the yellow cylinders (Claw shape just smaller than the core of the cap, uses friction). The arm must be able to rotate 180 degrees.
A 4m v5 base will be extremely helpful for torque on the park as well as potentially gearing up the drive to achieve a middle RPM such as 600rpm geared 3:5 (360rpm) and 600rpm geared 3:7 (260rpm) or 200rpm geared 2:1 for speed (400rpm)
In the beginning when people dont have the most consistent robot especially with the flags it might be better to build a cap bot with 4m base but eventually transition to 2m base when subsystem designs develop and begin to require more than 4 motors for maximum efficiency