wire

[joepoxon]

hello i was wondering if anyone could help, For the drive of my robot i am using 2 12v drill motors and i may overvolt to 16v however i dont know if this a good ideer or not, pluss what size wire should i use for ether 12v or 16v
thank you

[Ellis]

Re: wire

Hi,

The wire you will need won't change. If you want a bit of extra security, a size up or two from the wire that comes already on the motors might be a good idea. Over-speccing stuff in this hobby is good practice.

What batteries have you got planned to use? 16v is a bit of an odd number.

[joepoxon]

Re: wire

Well as it is my first robot i was going to use the drill motor batterys with 3 more cells solderd on, the reason being that anything less isent woth doing and anything more will fry my ESC, and thank you i will be safe rather than sorry as wire is pritty mutch the same price regardless of the size

[Ellis]

Re: wire

The problem I see, then, if you're confident your setup can take the voltage, will be in charging the batteries. You can't use your original drill charger if you make your setup run at 15.6v (what 13 cells nominally adds up to). You will need a smart charger to do that. So next question is, what charger do you intend to use?

My advice here might be to stick with the tried and tested 12v, and move on in due time. You definitely won't be disappointed by the power of 12v drills at their designed voltage. If you eventually feel like taking it up a notch, you'll be beyond using the cells that come with drills anyway, I'm sure.

That said, we didn't completely follow the trodden path with our first robot, and we probably learned more than we would have if we had, so it's your robot and your call.

Also in regards to whether overvolting is a good idea or not, it is and isn't. It is in that the power benefits are marked, but it isn't in that reliability suffers.

[joepoxon]

Re: wire

thank you for all the advise and yeah i probably will just do 12v to begin with, i think reliability is better than power as you have no use of power if the thing wont work

[typhoon_driver]

Re: wire

For your info the rule of thumb that has been found over many years of robot fighting is that a motor will generally stand up to a 1.5 times it's rated voltage (ie running a 12v motor on 18v) however the gearing must be dropped to reduce the stress on the motor and you shouldn't expect it to last as long.