Night Crawler Weapon Test: RPM & Current Draw

Here's how I test my bots to better understand current draw, weapon speed, and component performance. In this video, I'm testing Night Crawler before the Motorama 2024 competition. The bot is bolted to a heavy base for safety.
Since I'm running a relatively small battery (1300mAh, 6s), I can't run the weapon throttle full blast for 3 minutes. Theoretically, I need to average 26amps continuous to burn through 1300mAh in three minutes. 20 amps is a good target to leave some wiggle-room.
The test hardware here runs the throttle in 20% increments, for 30 seconds each. This lets me know what to expect in terms of current draw and RPM. This also runs the weapon for 2.5 minutes, which is a good stress test. I also measure temperature of the motor, speed controller, and bearings after each test run.
After these tests, I decided to configure the controller for 60% "Low Speed" and 80% "High Speed" settings. Past competitions have taught me that 80% throttle is almost too much, the gyro forces cause some real driving challenges. I'll save that 80% (or 100%) throttle for those truly difficult opponents.
Learn more about Night Crawler here:
/ teamcosmosbots
www.teamcosmos.com

[@bami2]

The ring light is showing weapon power/PWM requested from the receiver/transmitter?
I love how this shows the exponential relation between sustaining speed and current/power draw.
4k rpm -> ~2.5A, 6.3k rpm -> ~6.3A, 8.8k rpm -> ~14.5A, 10.5k rpm -> ~23A, 11.1k rpm -> ~30A
So for every 2k rpm increase you're about doubling the power required. Very informative!

[@PeteCovert]

The receiver doesn't come into play here. The ring light is sending out the PWM signals itself, that way it's completely repeatable each time. Originally I was manually moving the throttle, but it was hard to be consistent between runs.

[@jamisongo]

@@PeteCovert super cool. i bet you could productize that

[@tedz74]

Ludacris speed!