We have a Banebots 775 motor with its power leads shorted to the case. You can imagine why this would be an issue. We are not sure whether this is the one from the kit or the additional one we ordered.
Is anyone else having this issue? If you have NOT run your 775’s yet, could you check them and see if they have this problem? It would be nice to know if they are DOA or if they were damaged while running in the robot.
John mentioned it in his blog post, but we saw this on some brand new out-of-the box motors, too. It wasn’t limited to just the ones we had already run.
We’ve also run into an issue where the “red dot” that presumably indicates where the positive terminal of the motor is is not consistent between the RS-775s.
We have a single gearbox that mates to two RS-775s, and had them both wired according to the red dot, and when we powered them up, they ran in opposite directions…
Although we aren’t using any on our bot I’m gonna check ours just for kicks.
Side note: it really is good practice to check all motors for such issues before you use them, prevents nasty little surprises sometimes. I never apply power to a new motor (in FIRST or otherwise) without testing it for ground faults and other problems.
Imagine two of your motors have a short to the case, and they’re mounted to metal parts of your robot that connect…interesting things might happen.
I think it’s also against the rules to have any power applied to the metal parts of the robot.
<R36> All wiring and electrical devices, including all control system components, shall be electrically isolated from the ROBOT frame. The ROBOT frame must not be used to carry electrical current (e.g. this is necessary due to polarity reversals that occur under certain operating conditions such as during motor direction reversals).
Use a multimeter to check the resistance between one of your motor leads and the motor casing. If it is conductive, you’ve got a problem.
We pulled one apart and tried to fix it, but no luck.
We haven’t done the RMA process and probably won’t bother (the motors have all been modified for use). The ordering (waiting) process was painful enough.
We had one of these motors (via AM Planetary) driving the same gear as a CIM. One of my freshman was wondering why the “gear was sparking.” I told him it was normal to see sparks coming out the back of an open motor like the 775. He corrected me – “not out the back, on the front… on the gear.” Ugh – that was when we first noticed the issue.
They believe the problem is caused by a small amount of debris in the motor possibly introduced during manufacturing.
They have had success with several motors in house when they apply 12V between the motor lead and the case. This zaps the debris and you should be good to go. You might have try this with both leads depending on where the debris is.
I will try this on our 2 shorted motors tonight and post our results.
Would it be legal to open the motors for the purpose of cleaning them as long as they were not modified in any way?
I know it would be a difficult task, and might end up damaging the motors, but applying 12vdc across a known short is not what I would consider a safe option let alone a good fix. More debris could still be in the motor, and the frag from blasting the original offender is still in there and becomes a complete unknown. It would be like asking Murphy pay a visit at the worst possible moment.