For this year at FIRST my FRC team is trying to make our launcher get the note into the speaker, but we are having issues. Currently our plan is to use two motors on each side of the launcher. As of late, we have been trying to use Neo Vortex motors but have quickly found that they may not work. I just wanted to know what people were using and to get some more ideas.
What about these isnât working? How are they attached to the wheels that shoot? Are you controlling the speed with PID control or just raw speed?
We need some more information
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Weâve got a pair of Vortex motors working great⌠hit the 16â ceilings in our shop just last night with a note!
We have top/bottom rollers, and a single Vortex is more than enough to blast the notes into the speaker from decently far away. Four of them should definitely be enough power, probably too much power honestly. What about them isnât working?
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Using 2 motors per side (so presumably 4 total?) is overkill for a shooter this year, especially if youâre using powerful brushless motors like the vortex. My team is using 2 Falcon 500s, and can launch notes most of the way across the field.
If you arenât getting the performance you want with 2 or more motors, thereâs probably a bigger issue with the shooter than your motor choice. What type of shooter are up you using, and how much are you compressing notes?
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Mirroring what others are saying, we have krakens on our shooter, and VERY IMPORTANTLY we discovered, we are not reducing them, rather we need to âgear them upâ to increase the speed of the wheels based on the motor output. If youâre reducing the motors somehow, that may be a key reason as to why youâre not getting the power you want
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All of these things impact shot speed/consistency:
- Motor type
- number of motors
- wheel surface speed/size/gearing
- wheel surface finish
- how and where you compress the note
- how much you compress the note
- how you feed the note into the shooter
- feed speed/consistency
- how âlocked downâ / immobile the mechanism is
- having multiple degrees of freedom that adjust the shot (angle adjust / turret / etc)
Probably more too that Iâm not thinking of right now.
FWIW weâve been able to make the note go pretty far consistently using only 1 brushless motor total (tried with both a NEO 1.1 and a Kraken, both worked).
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Thatâs actually a gear up, or upduction.
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Circling back to this again
Last night we received and tested a single Neo Vortex on our shooter system. Just straight onto the shaft of our flywheel bar. At 85% we were getting into the speaker from a static position on the floor. Think like KitBot with an angled plate shooter with 1 motor driving two horizontal bars at the end. The bars are geared together to get opposite rotation, but no speed change. These compress the note top to bottom with the flywheels and are a high rpm shooter.
It works great. Like literally just worked as expected. Maybe part of the issue is which way you are compressing the notes and what type of wheels you are using. But the neo vortex is absolutely capable of handling this task.
As a note we didnât have a Flex so we used the solo adapter with a Spark Max not sure if this limits itâs overall power or not, but we didnât need it if that does make a difference. Being at 85% means we can bump it up and get further away probably, but we werenât up to the subwoofer for the test.
2656 is using one NEO on each side, driving two shooter wheels on each side. The NEO motors do not have gearboxes, and are running 1:1
At â100%â, theyâre more than powerful enough to score in the Speaker from close by. I imagine they could score from a fair distance, with a lower-angle shot.
Itâs worth mentioning these are side by side shooter wheels, as if the Kitbot had two wheels on each side. Also our Notes are compressed to 9" in width. We have a lid that stops them from lifting up too high as they pass between the wheels.
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Any issues with the notes hitting the belts or those are covered too? The top set I mean where the red dashed line is
Our one Falcon 500 (essentially similar but not quite as powerful as your Neo Vortex) has to be throttled a bit for a good powerful shot using a pair of top/bottom rollers.
You can see the most clearly in this video (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2oDVs0rIUio) but with the belts on top of the wheels, the Notes do not bump into the belts. They seem to be high enough to miss.
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We are using top and bottom rollers powered by 2 krakens. Probably overkill but ehâŚ
You can never have too much power imo, we are using two horizontal rollers each powered by a kraken that is stepped up.
We tested our design and found that one of the main reasons we were having issues was due to the fact that our motors were located too far back, we moved them almost flush to the end of our launcher and it worked. Now we are trying to find at which angle is needed in order to score every time
Another thing that may have helped is we went to smaller wheels, and changed our speed to about 50% I think this may have helped us get more power out of the motors and gain less friction. We might also try to add weight of some sort to the wheels to give them a flywheel effect. Thanks for all the help so far.
I do like this idea, and I think Iâve seen a bot with it before. I kind of want to pitch it to my team to see if we could test it. Might get the âflywheelâ type effect I was talking about. Anything that will make the bot reliable is something Iâm willing to try.
Its not just free speed, but torque at a given RPM that matters. If you gear reduce a motor too much and are shooting at or near free speed, the motor will output zero torque and therfore the motors are unable to add power to the shot during the shot and spintup time will be horrible. Upducting a motor allows you to shoot at closer to 66% or 50% of the free speed which allows the motor to pull much more current during a shot and therefore outputting more torque and decelerating less which is important.
I think what you are saying is essentially what we figured out because our neoâs worked fine at 50-70% but wouldnât hardly shoot at 100%