direct drive encoders?

[JP Carlin]

Can you direct drive a cim with an encoder on its shaft? We dont plan on using a gear box? can we use 3M double sided tape to keep it on? Or should we find a way to mount it? Will it be able to be on all the time or should we take it off after testing.

[droswell]

The hardware can only ready encoders at a certain speed. If the encoder is spinning too rapidly, the pulses will come in faster than the FPGA can read them.

For the VEX encoder we purchased, we determined the max RPM was 1,133. Since our motor is putting out 7,000rpm, it won't work. All we have to do is find a couple of gears and get our encoder shaft attached at a lower rpm to make this work.

Since a CIM spins at 5300 rpm with no load, I suspect you will have the same problem. You will need reduce the speed of your encoder shaft with gears/belts/chain to make this work.

[JP Carlin]

We are using the encoder that comes straight out of the kit of parts and also we will be putting a load on the cim as we are using it as our shooter so it will slow down when we put a ball through it we just dont know how much. I just want to know if it is possible to attach the encoder to the shaft on the cim or the axel that it is spinning to see if we can get a reading from it.

[AustinSchuh]

If you go much past a 64 count/rev encoder off the shaft of the CIM, you will start to loose counts. We have run both 128 and 64 count/rev encoders on the CIM shaft, and the 128 ones seemed like they were missing counts.

[waialua359]

Yes you can.
Our team has already done it before and doing it again this season.
It successfully gives us readings, allowing us to use a PID loop to keep the RPM's of the shooter wheel constant.

[JP Carlin]

Thanks for the info guys we will be trying this out with the ecoders today to see if we will have some luck and be able to fine tune our shooter