Has anyone attempted to fix a broken Falcon motor? For example taking two busted motors and getting one working one? I know they have security screws, so obviously they don’t want you messing with them. My hardware hacker friends say: If you can’t take it apart, you don’t own it.
Haven’t done a refurbish, did ask the community for advice and wrote a teardown guide because I had a faulty V3 this season.
https://www.frczero.org/electronics/electronics-troubleshooting/falcon-500-fixes/
The teardown for V3 is similar to the V2 and V1. It’s at the very bottom of the page
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If I recall, falcons are calibrated individually at the factory. So my guess is that if you tear things down far enough (probably anything that messes with encoder/clocking of the rotor), that you’d cause some issues when you tried to run the motor after reassembly.
This is purely a hunch tho, nothing necessarily factual about what I’ve written unless someone can back up my claims.
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That is correct. They are factory calibrated.
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We have done this in the past, purposely ruining the factory calibration. If you have one motor whose mechanics don’t work and one whose electric are shot, it’s worth it to end up with one working motor. That motor won’t perform quite as well as a stock motor (because of the messed up calibration) and we wouldn’t put it on a competition robot, but for $220 it’s better to have a spinning motor than two paperweights.
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It would be nice to have a theory of operation. I .e. what is the calibration procedure? Also it would be educational to know how the encoders determine both speed, direction of rotation and angular displacement, and how that communicates with the can bus.
The calibration procedure had not been publicly disclosed by ctre, and likely requres internal tools. IIRC the falcon uses a simpler rotationaly polarized magnet setup that the cancoder uses, just with half the resolution. Ad far as that being communicated to the CAN buss? IIRC they use some kind of dsPIC33 chip for ther on-board computing and motor controll, which supports bilth can 2.0 and CAN FD, alsong woth a host of other awesome features. It is also possible to partly disassemble the motor without messing up the factory calibration, yiu just can separate the TalonFX controller from the motor itself or open the controller housing.
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