Hello ive been having trouble with my flywheel but we got stuck whether to use torque or speed so we ask which would be better and pls give us a ratio that is reccomended thx
You didn’t specify whether you were talking about a single or dual flywheel. Here are my suggestions for a single flywheel, although I’ve been told that dual flywheels are easier (I don’t know if that’s true or not).
If you gear your flywheel for torque, your flywheel won’t be able to spin fast enough to pass kinetic energy to the ball. If this is your first flywheel, then make a 35:1 ratio on a 4" wheel (84:12 compounded to a 60:12). Although it isn’t the best ratio, that was the easiest configuration for me to get full court shots. Just make sure that axles never go through more than 2 bearings, and ease up on compression between the wheel and compression plate. Using lexan on the compression plate and elastics on the wheel can help with grip on the ball, and it added a few more feet to our launch distance.
I’m assuming the OP’s question was regarding the internal motor gearing, since flywheels operate using really high speeds. That is really dependent on your gear ratio. We use a 35:3 gear ratio with turbo motors (also 5" wheels instead of 4" wheels), which comes out to be 28:1 (relative to torque motors, technically turbo motors have a 3:4 internal gear ratio, but it makes life easier to put it in reference to the 100 rpm stock torque motor). That works really well for us for a single flywheel at full court.
Excellent suggestions, one alternative to using additional bearing flats if the axle must go through several c-channels is drilling larger holes in all but 2 of the c-channels (ideally leave the outside ones). Another tip is check all of your bearing flats. Because of manufacturing tolerances, some are really tight, and increase friction. Don’t use those.
The only reason not to use the highest internal gearing available to you (turbo gears if possible) is if you need to very precisely fine-tune the gear ratio and you can’t get the ratio you want using turbo gears.
Gears things up or down is inefficient. Gearing things down and then back up is doubly inefficient, so you want to avoid doing that if you can.
For a 4-motor full field dual flywheel shooter, a ratio of about 20:1 (assuming 4" wheels) works pretty well. One way to get that ratio is turbo motors, 1:7 gearing and 5" wheels but there are other combinations. For a 2-motor dual flywheel shooter you will want slightly higher gearing (23:1 maybe) and your motors will take longer to recover making your fire rate less fast.
I would suggest a 25:1 or 49:3 gear ratio. You want a good balance of torque and speed. You want speed to launch the ball, and torque to get the launcher back up to speed quickly after launching a ball. I would suggest torque motors for this. My team tried speed motors and the motors stalled too easily and had a very slow rebound time. Torque doesn’t stall and has a fast rebound time.
If you are using a 25:1 gear ratio externally and speed internal gearing then your gearing is just too high (for a dual flywheel launcher). If you’re going to change the internal gearing then you need to change the external gearing to compensate, and if you do that correctly then a faster internal gearing will be more efficient.
We have a 21:1 ratio on our flywheels
We run turbo gears internally and 7:1 external. I don’t think you can have a more simple setup. Only one set of external gears. We can launch cross court at approximately 60% power.