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Unread 08-12-2014, 15:56
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AllenGregoryIV AllenGregoryIV is offline
Engineering Coach
AKA: Allen "JAG" Gregory
FRC #3847 (Spectrum)
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Join Date: Jul 2008
Rookie Year: 2003
Location: Texas
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Re: Keeping the main breaker from tripping

There isn't any one solution. We ran 6 CIMs, & 2 MiniCIMs through 7 events this past year counting off-season events and never tripped the main breaker.

We were running a butterfly type drive so we were mostly on 4 omni-wheels which means we have minimal wheel scrub.

Wire management is also important. Ensure that you have the shortest possible wire path from your battery to your drive train motors. This means your battery wires to PD board/panel should be short, your wires from speed controllers to PD panel should be short, and the wires from speed controllers to motors need to be short as well. This takes a lot of pre-planning to do well.

We also used a single reduction gearbox that made it very efficient compared to more complicated gear boxes and we also ensured that our wheels would slip before we ever stalled the drive train motors.

On our practice robot we ran fans over the motors to keep things cool during long sessions and we will likely look at adding fans over our motors and our main breaker on next year's robot.
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