Quote:
Originally Posted by Dunngeon
Have you guys purchased new batteries since 2013/used the same batteries this year? I've found that many teams that run 4cim drives have no idea how bad the condition of their batteries is. A battery that is in bad condition can lead to sluggish accelerations because it's ability to release, or store energy has decreased. This type of problem is more prevalent among 6CIM drivebases, because the acceleration is higher, thus energy demand is increased. However, i could definitely see this impacting a 4cim setup if the battery has degraded enough.
As a general rule, we only run competition batteries for 2 years before retiring them to a non-competition use, such as a practice bot.
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We take good care of our batteries and purchase new ones every year. I don't think it's a battery issue because our 2014 robot has had very few issues regarding the drivetrain, and we interchange 2013 and 2014 batteries with it. This makes me think the issue in 2013 was mechanical efficiency of some sort - we used omni wheels in 2014 which meant there was very little wheel scrub so it took very little power to turn rapidly. In both 2011 and 2014 we used 4 inch wheels and those were our best drivetrains in terms of acceleration as well as turning ability.
So we were thinking the cause was the heavy and big radius 8 inch wheels, but correlation does not necessarily mean causation and Jared's equations prove that there is little effect. So next we'll be looking at electrical possibilities like Munchskull brought up. We're not extremely concerned because our 2014 drivetrain worked out so well, but it's always nice to figure out what went wrong and learn from our mistakes.