Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared341
Other teams have used successfully 6-motor drive setups geared for similar speeds in the past, but as you pointed out, this was in the IFI era when we often had backup batteries (even before backup batteries, does anyone have data on how low the main battery has to go before the RC reset?).
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I have anecdotal data about the pre backup battery from 2002. MOEhawk our 2002 bot was geared for in my estimation well over 20fps (seriously it was the fastest top speed FIRST Bot I've seen including '08 lap bots) with 2 drill motors and 2 CIM (traction wheels in back, homemade omnis in front in the days before Andymark
). It employed a 3 goal grabber strategy similar to 71's legendary bot, so the fast drive train was only intended to be used in the first couple seconds. After that we would anchor down (didn't have shuffle drive like 71) for the rest of the match.
At VCU, we noticed the 4 motors would drop the battery votage to <5 and the IFI controller would reboot into some sort of Safe Mode where the latency between joystick commands and actions was very long (again this what I remember about a weird problem many years based paritailly on driver observations so take it with a grain of salt). It also blew fuses on the IFI controller. At VCU, We re-geared the drive a bit slower to fix this problem (and also because our 14 ft wingspan had not fully deployed in the time we could hit the goals so we had to slow down). On ship day, we just finished the massive bot (including deburring hundreds of lightning holes), drove it with the moto "Don't break it" and stuck it in the crate. Let this be a lesson to drive your bot hard before shipping to find problems (or as we call it
Break Robot. Re-engineer. Repeat! 
).