CIM Motor not performing as expected when run by VictorSPX

Technical Motors
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1

Hello CD,

We’re running into a large issue with our climber mechanism. Not with the mechanism specifically, but rather the motor running it. Earlier testing with the exact setup showed that the Mini Cim motor we are using to run the system would be more than powerful enough. We also ran tests with a cordless drill connected to the shaft which ran the climber easily as well (for testing).

Recently, we connected the Mini Cim to a VictorSPX for the first time and tested it. Unfortunately, we found that the motor stalled easily even when no load was applied (no cage being pulled). The VictorSPX is connected to our CTRE PDP with a 30A breaker. The battery was fully charged. We first tried 30% speed, but even when testing 90% speed, the same symptoms occurred. The CTRE Tuner app showed that the VictorSPX would occasionally be tripping the 30A breaker during this stall events, but not always. We also tried swapping the Mini Cim out with a full Cim, but no change. The VictorSPX is running with factory default settings, except for the idle mode which we switched to “Brake”.

TLDR: Our Mini Cim is performing much worse with a VictorSPX motor controller than with direct power from the battery, and we can’t figure out why.

Any help is much appreciated as our competition is this week and we never expected this to be an issue.

2

Do you have a current limit applied on the controller? (Don’t remember if Victor SPX could do current limits)

How much current is it showing being drawn? How much current was it drawing when testing without the Victor SPX?

And also, how were you testing the motor without a motor controller to control it? Plugging directly into a battery?

3

I’m not aware of any current limit on the motor controller, I don’t think the VictorSPX can do current limits as I’ve been told it does not have a current sensor. That also means I don’t know how much current is being drawn.

We just directly connected the motor to the battery for testing, so we don’t know how much current it was drawing then either.

We would try a SparkMAX for this but unfortunately we don’t have another one.

4

You can read the current via the PDP - you should be able to see it either in Tuner X or in the driver station logs. If you connect the motor to the PDP directly (carefully) and then via the Victor you should be able to see if they are drawing the same amount of current.

That being said, the easiest solution would probably to ask a local team to borrow a Talon SRX motor controller. That definitely has current monitoring and limiting, and you’ll be reasonably confident there’s nothing broken with it. Lots of teams have switched to brushless motors which means they probably have a bunch of Talon SRXes they’re not using.

5

I see, alright, thank you! We’ll put some requests out for either a SparkMAX or a TalonSRX, maybe they’ll perform better.