Has anyone used these successfully in the past?
If so, in what application?
Did they perform as advertised? Were they reliable? Were you satisfied with them?
Thanks,
-Cory
I’ve used them for non FIRST applications.
They are pretty much similar to FP motors; Although they are less powerful (but you can tell from the specs already) and burn out much easier at stall.
So, just like the FP motor. If you accept their limitations, they are a nice powerful motor that can be easily mated to many different gearboxes.
We used the BB motor that came on the 64:1 gearbox to power our arm last year. We bought a 125:1 gearbox to get more reduction, then used it to drive a chain system with a further 8:1 reduction. This was used to raise and lower a long arm which gripped the tube on the end. It worked fine thru 2 regionals, and in demonstrations over the summer, and is still working. No smoke from the motor. We bought several replacements, but never needed to use them. Our arm was designed with a gas spring to support most of the weight, and we were always careful to not stall the motor. If you take these design precautions, the motor should be fine. If you treat the motor like a CIM, you’ll probably smoke it.
We used them before and had some unusual performance drop that made it appear like burned out a single pole. Once we figured it out and replaced it the motor was fine.
I would de-rate the banebots numbers on them a bit based on our experiences as well. The advantage to using them is they are cheap to replace < $6 each and for around $30-40 from Banebots they have planetaries are available in many ratios for these motors making them easy to adapt to a mechanism without much effort.