Subject:
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Re: motors are stuck...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos
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Date:
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Sun, 17 Mar 2002 13:47:11 GMT
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Viewed:
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1881 times
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Jeremy,
The motors that come with Mindstorms are geared internally, and it's
probably jammed gears that are causing you woes. Your "friend" gave you some
broken motors. I've never taken one apart-- it snaps together in a way that
looks easy to break when you take it apart. So, now is your chance to see
the inside of one- they are already broken, so the worst that can happen is
you break it more. In the best case, you might see how its jammed and can
fix it. You've got 3 tries.
The only input that a motor takes is voltage of one way or the other. A
motor can also act as a generator, so to "lock" a motor the RCX shorts it
out, turning it into a brake. But this goes away once you turn the RCX off
or disconnect it.
You don't even need an RCX to run a Lego motor. They can also run off of a
straight battery box. Lego sells two different kinds, a white one with
forward and reverse buttons, and the other with a push button that can be
operated by lego mechanisms. I sometimes use one of them to test my
mechanisms before hooking up and programming and RCX.
-Benton
Lugnet #1514
http://www.goatrider.com/lego/lego.html
In lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos, Jeremy Clark writes:
> I recently inherited an RCX 1.0, a serial IR tower and a few motors from a
> gracious friend. After many headaches, I finally got legOS 0.2.5 running on
> RH 7.1 and am able to compile and DL programs to the RCX. There is one odd
> thing, however - of the four motors that my friend gave me, three of them
> appear to be completely locked. Not only does the "motor_X_dir(dir)" command
> not make them spin, they are completely resistant to rotation even by hand.
> The fourth motor spins freely by hand, and responds properly to the motor
> control calls in legOS.
>
> Is it possible that the motors were last used with an RCX running the lego
> firmware or some other OS, and that some lock command, like "off" in NQC,
> was sent to the motor, and now there is no legOS call that will unlock it?
> It just seems weird that they don't move at all.
>
> I tried sending motor_X_dir(off) to the motor, but that didn't help.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Thanks-
> Jeremy Clark
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: motors are stuck...
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| You may also be able to return them to Lego for free and get replacements, it depends on how old they are. I would try before you have to buy a new motor, they aren't the cheapest. Andy ----- Original Message ----- From: "Benton Jackson" (...) (23 years ago, 17-Mar-02, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | motors are stuck...
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| I recently inherited an RCX 1.0, a serial IR tower and a few motors from a gracious friend. After many headaches, I finally got legOS 0.2.5 running on RH 7.1 and am able to compile and DL programs to the RCX. There is one odd thing, however - of the (...) (23 years ago, 17-Mar-02, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos)
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