After practicing our robot for a while we have noticed the belts on our Drive base like to pickup carpet lint and other debris and imbed it into our belts and pulleys. This is not great because it impacts drive performance and causes the robot to not drive straight.
Has anyone else had this issue and have the some tips on how to clean them out? Right now we are scrapping the gunk out with a small screwdriver, but maybe their are better, less time consuming methods.
This might not work with the tooth profile of a timing belt (or for that matter the access space in your robot), but in FIRST LEGO League we found that clothing lint rollers are great at removing dust and debris from LEGO tires.
Standard carpet fluff, the stuff that mixes with grease and builds up in a thin layer over time, shouldn’t be able to do this. I would look more into a not driving straight issue than simply attributing it to carpet fluff. Carpet strings tied up in drivetrain components is a whole different thing though.
We took an entire strip of gaffers tape off the field this year. Wrapped around the main drive pulley on our kit chassis. Wasn’t fun to get out, and made it very hard to move that side.
Carpet dust/fluff shouldn’t be remotely as bad, and unless it is building up substantially, I can’t even imagine noticing it.
There was also a bit of tape that got in a pulley and covered with lint. The AndyMark practice field is also just pretty dirty. Once we cleaned the belts the robot drove normally again.
I have no pictures, but there was extremely large clumps of debris in the belts. I think it just because the field was quite dirty. Cybertooth, who also practices there, also regularly have to clean their belts.
The robot could still drive fine for teleop, but it curved just enough to screw up our longer distance autos.
We experienced something similar this season. Not sure what changed, but we had dense buildup of gunk in the root of the tooth on our belts and pulleys that did noticeably impact performance. It wasn’t too hard to get out with a small screwdriver or such, but we did take apart each side of our KoP drive to clean everything out.
Not saying that that you’ve diagnosed wrong, but if your robot isn’t going straight, be sure to check the bolts in the aluminum hub. Don’t think I’ve ever seen enough lint to cause much of an issue.
I made sure we didn’t have this issue immediately after this became a known problem. I don’t believe we even used the screws that came with this year’s kit.
The field we practice on at AndyMark has been very well used this season, so there’s plenty of debris on the field from the carpet and wooden lower hub. We cleaned the belts and pulleys out on Saturday and the robot felt completely different. After about three hours of driving it needed cleaned again.