Team 2980's Open Source FIRST BOT

[DavidGitz]

Originally Posted by eedoga

@ DavidGitz While the total weight of our arm is about 26 pounds that includes the base and other non-articulated parts. It would be asking a lot to try and have the motor move the arm when it is extended. We instead are planning on retracting the arm before rotating it. In fact the only time we should have to extend our arm is in order to reach the top peg.

That said we drove the robot around quite a bit today. We realized that we had the mecanum wheels mounted wrong and swapped them out. The robot handles a lot better thanks to the Chief Delphi community.

The arm seams to work a lot better especially if you don't wave it all over the place. :-) The motor was able to repeatedly move the arm without overheating, though that remains a concern.

Ok, that's good to hear. I think the window motors are a great asset, if you are careful with the design and minimize friction/binding as much as possible.

Overheating is a concern to us. Normally we have been using one of the large muffin fans from the KOP on each arm window motor and it keeps them ice cold, even after running for 8 hours non-stop. However today we had to turn our window motors off due to some re-wiring (and putting fence material over the blades so fingers don't go in bad places...) and the window motors over-heated after about 25 minutes of driver practice and wouldn't budge until they cooled down.