We had been running our elevator consistently, even though it was extremely heavy, and the motors, 2 NEOS, were only geared 7 : 1. We added 20 lbs of constant force springs, and then loaded the same code, but instead of speeding up on the way up (the way they should after taking weight away), the motors slowed down, and weren’t able to lift the elevator by themselves. We tested out raw percentage output, and it just seemed like our entire elevator system slowed down for no apparent reason. Since we are close to our first competition, we decided to just speed up the constraints on our profiled PID controller, hence applying more output to the motors, speeding them up.
Running them like this gets the job done the majority of the time, and reaches its setpoints, but occasionally, the elevator gearing area makes clicking noises, offsets the encoder, and we can’t figure where they are coming from, since we can’t replicate it often. Its too inconsistent to be programmatical, or electrical, so the only explanation is that the motors have gone bad, but replacing them would take a significant amount of time, which we don’t have too much of.
TL;DR: Elevator slowed down after adding CF springs, and clicks and messes up encoder sometimes.
Any help is greatly appreciated.