We are planning to buy Neo Vortex Spark Flex. We will use them as drive motors (MK4) and probably for some parts of the robot. Do you have special suggestions or did you had any issues for this motor ?
Is there a reason you are leaning away from krakens?
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Unsure if this got resolved, but this was an issue from earlier this year:
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As a Turkish team it’s hard for us to track and deal with shipment and customs of motors. Also krakens are in backorder at the moment and are expected to restock mid december. Last year we had problems with shipment, our cargo got lost and we couldn’t acquired it at expected date.
Interesting. Are customs better for REV products?
We used these last year – early firmware versions had some issues but, after that, they worked well. So, just be sure to upgrade the firmware before you start to use them.
By the way, I briefly visited Turkey when I was volunteering at FIRST Global a couple of months ago and had a great visit. It’s on my list to return to someday.
We use them on our MaxSwerve and they work great, but our sister team 3128 initially used Vortexes on their MK4is last year and had a lot of issues with them breaking, mainly after hard hits, and switched to krakens and had no further issues.
I suspect that Vortexes don’t work as well with being mounted on those massive standoffs that MK4is use for motor mounting, but it wasn’t my robot so I didn’t get a super in depth look at it. Maybe one of them can chime in.
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We had issues with drive motor faceplates cracking, likely primarily after big hits(oops my bad). Since we were running the 16t pinion adapters on our mk4i, we couldn’t support the motor shafts on top with a bearing, something I believe that would have mitigated the issue somewhat. We had no issues with vortexes as turn motors, in the offseason we switched to kraken drive/vortex steer to have enough motors for two robots, didn’t see any issues with them.
They are great motors, REV’s customer service is amazing with them, and we will likely continue to use them, just probably not as drive motors going forward.
To clarify, we use mk4i, not mk4, so I’m not sure if the same issue exists with the mk4.
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We used Vortexes on our Mk4is for CMP and two off-season events without issue. We added bearings between the Modules’ top plates and the motor shafts, and that might have helped prevent any risk with face plate cracking: Kraken vs vortex for swerve - #7 by nuclearnerd
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