Surge Protectors

[K. Skontrianos]

Does anyone have a good way to reduce the surges caused by sudden loads on the drive motors? I have a feeling that people will be burning motors/kicking breakers alot this year due to the heavy strain that will be placed on the drives. My team has been experimenting with 2 methods to reduce surges. One involves measuring the speed of a wheel, which (to my surprise) worked after spending about 1 hr trying to program it. Does anyone else have a good idea as to reducing these sudden electrical surges?

[Joe Johnson]

I am an advocate of giving the drivers time to learn the edges of the envelope.

Smooth driving and knowing when to let off the sticks will go a long way to keeping your fuses, fused and your circuit breakers in the circuit.

Just my 2 cents.

Joe J.

[K. Skontrianos]

I agree that driver practice is very important. I am one of the two drivers, and I always make sure to ease into turns and the like. I have tried to convince everyone that having more automatic driver overrides will only complicate things. However, even with careful driving the breakers still worry me.

[Ian W.]

Well, i'm one of my team's two programmers/drivers. i'm both, because since i programed it, i'm the only one tyhat knows the buttons. anyways, my other programming friend put in some fancy thing to make the motors speed up slowly and slow down slowly. amazingly, it worked amazingly. i'm not sure how he did it, but it's pretty cool. especially when the motor's weren't hooked up to the drive train yet, instead of flipping out on a full forward to full back in one second thing, they slowed down, and then speed up the other way. it's cool

as for my toher part, the driver, i know more or less how we'll drive. i didn't get much time to proactice (maybe an hour?), but i was able to see how it will handle somewhat. hopefully we'll be nimble, yet powerful. i guess i'll find out in a week.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

You can also program so that drive modules actually run most of the time at a reduced input (gear ratios chosen for slower speeds) and then use one of your buttons to program in a boost to full power for short durations. Monitoring current in each drive motor also helps. More on that later.
Good Luck All