Nice to see you found an easy solution to your base problem by changing the gearing to give you some more torque. You said your motors burn out after 4 mins, that’s not a good sign. On the other hand, matches are not that long so if you do a match, then cool for 2 mins and then a match you shouldn’t be having heating problems.
Yea, the main problem is for elimination matches where the window between matches is small as well as in practicing for driver skills (this is where I first really noticed these issues).
There are techniques your coder should be able to take that should make changing gear ratios/motor cartridges to be one-line-per-motor changes.
Really? What techniques could do something like this?
4M 84T to a 60T on the wheel should give you around 280rpm
plus if you have 600 rpm inserts setting a drivetrian like that makes it easy to gear down.
Passives are your go to
What sites can your school purchase from? Will they let you purchase directly from SMC?
SMC is the actual manufacturer of vex pneumatics
Abstraction. Frequently, I see roboteers posting code here that moves motors in degrees or ticks. At least with VexCode, I believe that if all you change is the cartridge from Blue/Green/Red the declaration of the motor to correspond to the new cartridge is all that needs to be done. PROS I think is different.
More broadly I frequently see things like this:
LFM = motor(PORT1);
LBM = motor(PORT2);
RFM = motor(PORT3);
RBM = motor(PORT4);
void autonomous() {
LFM.spinFor(30, degrees, false);
RFM.spinFor(30, degrees, false);
LBM.spinFor(30, degrees, false);
RBM.spinFor(30, degrees, true);
Claw.spinFor(90, degrees, true);
LFM.spinFor(-90, degrees, false);
RFM.spinFor(90, degrees, false);
LBM.spinFor(-90, degrees, false);
RBM.spinFor(90, degrees, true);
// etc.
}
Maybe the idea is to drive forward 4 feet, grab the goal and then turn around 180 degrees. The code above (and lack of comments) makes it impossible for anyone other than the author to know (and the author may then forget between sessions what they were trying to do). The coder determined, experimentally, that the robot’s motors need to move that many degrees to correspond to a 4 foot straight movement or a 180 degree turn.
I don’t discount that this method produces autonomous routines that do the right thing. They just make my eyes bleed and my soul to scream.
DriveTrain d = DriveTrain({PORT1, PORT2}, {PORT3, PORT4}, 200_RPM, 4_in, 16_inch, 1.0);
void autonomous() {
d.driveForward(4, feet);
Claw.spinFor(90, degrees, true);
d.turnAngle(180, degrees);
// etc.
}
Not only is the second block easier to read, it is now apparent that if the builder decides to change the drivetrain from a straight 4-motor 200 RPM direct-drive 4 inch wheels to a 6-motor 600 RPM external 36/60 on 3.25 inch wheels, the coder has to only change:
DriveTrain d = DriveTrain({PORT1, PORT2, PORT3}, {PORT4, PORT5, PORT6}, 600_RPM, 3.25_in, 15_inch, 36.0/60.0);
And the rest of the auton should work the same as it did on the previous physical chassis. Plus, my soul will be joyous, and my eyes shed tears of happiness!
I disagree. I think the ingenuity required for motor sharing is what will produce the best bots we see later on in the season as opposed to accommodating for the lack of pneumatics or relying on pneumatics. Beyond motor sharing, I think decreasing reliance on heavily motorized systems and spending time with passive mechanisms are excellent investments as you will find so many unique designs you could pursue as opposed to the meta. Really think outside the box and get creative with how you use your motors. Our team has had several designs just this season using motor sharing and passives, and although we decided not to follow through on most of them because we wanted more diversity in the designs we approached, it was still a beneficial thought process and more ideas came out of it. Yes, we all have to focus on what we need to be competitive, but even when that is the priority, I’m of the opinion you should make the most out of every single motor, because they are the only sources of motion, excluding pneumatics, on your robot.
Agreed. This is the proper way to do things
only Vex and like amazon
try getting them to allow SMC and Robosource
vex is usually slow and out of stock sometimes
schools can be very slow as well, so what i did to get pneumatics was get a sponsor, and ask them to donate the pneumatics instead of money lol
That’s a great idea
not sure how to find sponsors but that would work
along with the benefit of more money for the team
maybe make some sponsorship packages
it is actually surprisingly easy, you just need to send a lot of emails to a lot of companies till you find one (it helps if someone you know works there, our two sponsors are from companies that we know someone from)
Called an “in-kind” donation…it’s handy because the sponsor doesn’t have to involve their bean-counters (accountants) in the process. But you do have to find a sponsor who often uses/purchases the product you’re trying to get. At my previous company, we used pneumatics and automation all the time, and my boss told me to just buy what I needed for our teams, mixed into orders of stuff for our company. A few hundred dollars of pneumatic is nothing compared to the cost of commercial automation components.
im not sure if this conversation prompted this topic to be created, but if you want to know how to get sponsors, that would be a good place to go.
4m 333 on 3.25 can climb pretty well as long as you have a good center of gravity, it will still burn out after a bit but it lasts for over the time of one match