I am just interested about the different ways people keep there weapon motor cool
I like to know my options for cooling my weapon motor
We fight robots for 2 or 3 minutes at a time, so it’s not usually a concern with most designs, that’s not enough time for the motors to get hot enough to be damaged unless something has gone wrong.
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Most of the time what Joe said is correct. There can be uncommon exceptions though. In some matches when you have a spinner the spinner may be trying to spin up a lot with especially aggressive fights or if the weapon motor is used to self right.
In these cases it depends on your weapon motor setup. The issue is that smaller motors with high kv heat up very quickly because they don’t have much mass to heat up. A good idea with motors like that is to attach a heat sink or use an ali motor mount which will act as a heat sink. If you have a decently sized weapon motor I would ignore it
I have also seen people design 3dp pulleys or parts to mount onto a motor bell to act as a stronger blower fan although idk exactly how effective they are.
at the moment I’m using 3D printed parts for testing. However my motor is getting so hot. It’s melting through those parts with no issue so I need a way to keep it cool I need to cool it down as it gets hot enough to melt ASA in seconds
I’d be surprised if it’s purely heat generated from the motor if it’s getting hot enough to melt pulleys without a real load on it.
To me it would suggest there is some friction going on. Perhaps there isn’t quite enough clearance?
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I’m going to presume it’s pure heat generation as I have viewed it with a slimmer camera and there is no contact with any other parts
How tight is your weapon belt and are your weapon bearings running nice and free?
My belt is quite loose to the point. I can bend it about 2 cm with my finger and the bearings are moving freely
I realise I’m running Ants, but I was seeing enough heat to soften ABS on my weapon motor mounts.
So I have a centrifugal blower sucking air through the weapon motor..
it was hitting 112C this knocked 10-20C off that, I also use fibre washers to insulate between the mount and the screws/stand-offs that hold the motor in.
I also changed ratio on the belt drive to lower weapon RPM and reduce the torque needed on the motor. (torque is ~ proportional to current and current squared is proportional to power/heat)
How much tolerance do you have between the weapon bar and the bulkheads? Looks very tight in there
Through running some test I discovered that the motor doesn’t get hot if I don’t have my weapon connected so I believe the weapon belt may be pulling on the motor a bit. It causing a bit of friction so I’m looking into that now
I’d say you’re also using a motor with fairly low thermal mass (it’s quite small) on a weapon with pretty horrid efficiency (beaters are famously inefficient with power/aerodynamics). You may benefit from a redesign with a dimensionally larger motor if all else fails.
Which weapon motor are you using? It looks rather small for the weapon. As said above beaters tend to need more power so it makes sense why you might be running into issues.
Another thing to note is that the motor seems fairly enclosed. Outrunner motors like that are pretty good at moving air to remove heat but if the air has nowhere to go it can lead to heat building up more than normal. You may find on top of what others have mentioned having a more open motor mount design may also help remove heat.