We are running a neo 550 (mini neo) into a 30:1 versa planetary into an Andy mark climber in a box. When we apply power to it, the motor doesn’t spin, but when someone turn the motor a little bit it works fine. Has anyone ever seen this issue before?
We have another one on the bot and it works fine.
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You need to have the 550 connected to a Spark Max, never directly to a battery. Hopefully you didn’t just hook it up like that… ?
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Check your connection to the spark max. Sounds like 1 of your 3 leads to the motor isn’t making contact.
Maybe an Anderson that isn’t fully seated.
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It is connected to a spark max, and the code is running it at full power
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We tried that, and it has the same issues. We also tried a different neo, and same issue.
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Did you try a new spark max? Could be broken internally on the controller.
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We didn’t, but would that cause the motor to only work if it gets a starting turn? We can defenitly try that tomorrow.
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Well. Sure, depending on how it broke.
My understanding of what happens, is if 1 of the leads on the spark Max isn’t doing what it should, then it will only spin it it has a little help getting started.
Could be something else. You should consider factory resetting the spark max too, as something to try.
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We had this exact same issue with one our NEO 550s in our ball path. I vaguely remember it being an issue with the gearbox (to be fair we had a lot of issues with this subsystem so I could be thinking of a cause of a different issue). I’ll ask our mech people at the meeting tomorrow if I remember.
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I actually have seen this problem before, I think it’s more common on the 550 because of the lower current limits that it can sustain. If I remember correctly I believe that this is the motor landing on a coil that is broken, meaning that it isn’t able to spin, but since the other coils are fine it just needs to get past that one coil. I think this is caused from running the motor with too much current and effectively burning it out. I’m pretty sure that you have to retire the 550 since there’s no way to guarantee that you can consistently start up the motor.
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Or an Anderson contact that wasn’t quite fully clipped into the shell. Looks OK at a glance but doesn’t actually make contact. I have seen this happen at least twice. Since you said you tried a different Neo, carefully inspect the contacts on the SparkMax output wires.
With one contact not making, only 2 of the 3 coils get power so depending where it stops, it may or may not be able to restart. But once spun up, 2/3 of the coils is enough to move it (at reduced power).
You definitely want current limits on this application as well, as @anon37142155 said if you burn out a coil that could also produce this. But that seems unlikely to be the problem here since another (new?) Neo behaved the same way.
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Yeah definitely sounds like one coil isn’t working. Check the connections then replace the spark max.
My team was plagued with issues like this last year. My main guess was that the encoder wires were broken as they are very thin gauge aluminum wires. But honestly we never fixed it.
I asked a couple of people and some say they think it was gearbox and others say we replaced it, no one can remember completely, sorry I can’t be more helpful then that.
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Turns out that on the neo that we replaced it with, one of the power poles was loose. The original neo probably has something wrong with it.
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Bad encoder wires will generally cause the motor to not work at all. If you are getting a bad position signal the motor will usually just jerk around randomly.
While this issue definitely sounds like one of the three powerpoles, we have fried a neo550 by running it in a low-load situation with no encoder cable plugged in (it was a long night and we forgot to plug it in). When we called REV, they said this can happen to the 550s. I vaguely remember them saying that without the feedback, the spark max outputs full current which the 550 cannot handle. I could be misremembering. It was the first year they were out, so a bit ago.
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