Re: pic: Teaser from First Team 971: She's gonna be lighting fast
 

If I recall correctly, last year, between matches, the drive team (on occasion) would have to lift the hood and "fan the CIMs" by hand.

The muffin fans seem like a great idea.

Re: pic: Teaser from First Team 971: She's gonna be lighting fast
 

I am curious as well. Have you (someone from team 971) done any quantitative testing to see if there is significant difference in CIM motor operating temperatures?

Re: pic: Teaser from First Team 971: She's gonna be lighting fast
 

The claw is currently out of the frame perimeter, but not by much. It's easy to extrapolate where it would be inside the frame perimeter.

CAD claims it weighs 110 right now with batteries and bumpers. I bet it'll creep up to 120 - 125 lbs. We'd like to keep it light so that it accelerates well.

When running our 2009 robot at demos, the student driving the bot noticed that he was getting what seemed like over twice the runtime once fans were installed.

Also, when running practice rounds, the fans make it so we can run more matches per set period of time, since the bot doesn't need to cool as much.

Re: pic: Teaser from First Team 971: She's gonna be lighting fast
 

Interesting, may be worth setting up a couple during our testing and seeing if we can come to some kind of conclusive results. The one thing with the CIMs is once they get hot, they stay hot for a while, so preemptively cooling them seems like a good idea.

Thanks for the info!

-Brando

Re: pic: Teaser from First Team 971: She's gonna be lighting fast
 

Anything to cool the motors down is beneficial for a performance bot. With our tall gearing for top speed the motors draw a significant amount of amps. We noted that during practice sessions the fans do a good job of increasing air flow around the motor casings to reduce the heat.

We have installed thermistors on our motors and monitor the temperature from the operators station. The fans are mostly to extend the run time before the motor over heats.

If we can figure this out our robot may have Jaguar controlled automatic speed shifting.

Roy

Re: pic: Teaser from First Team 971: She's gonna be lighting fast
 

last year with our holomonic drive we noticed the cim would get up to 147ish degrees after some matches, so we added a fan to the top panel of our robot to circulate some hot our out, and we would measure the cim temps after matches. Especially at drive practice, but sometimes in competition, we set a box fan on top of our bot to cool them down between run times.

Re: pic: Teaser from First Team 971: She's gonna be lighting fast
 

That extra layer you see on the drivebase side panels are actually part of the bumper mounts.