Questions about motors

Motors can be a bit of a confusing topic, hopefully the answers below will make things clearer.

1. The actual speed of both motors will depend somewhat on the robot they are used in. You can think of motors as having two kinds of power associated to them:

1. How fast they can turn - this is their speed
2. How much turning strength they have - this is their torque

In this case I would expect the 50:1 micro metal gear motors to turn about 5-6x faster than the DiddyBorg Red Edition motors when they are spinning on their own. However they have a massively lower torque value, meaning they do not like moving much weight.

In practice with a small, light robot the micro motors will probably be noticeably quicker. With a robot of a similar size and weight to DiddyBorg they will probably move somewhat slower than the Red Edition motors, and will probably struggle to turn on the spot (tank-steer) on most surfaces.

In short for small robots the micro motors will be faster, but on medium sized or larger robots the Red Edition motors will generally end up being faster.

2. MonsterBorg motors are both faster and have a stronger turning force than the DiddyBorg Red Edition motors. They are about 3x the speed of Red Edition motors. The down side is they are much larger and use a bit more power.

3. At the moment no, we may make them available for purchase sometime in the future though.

4. This is a bit tricky to answer, it will largely depend on what motors you are using:

• 50:1 micro metal gear motors:
  Technically two motors on a single ZeroBorg output is outside of the current limit for the ZeroBorg in the worst case, but you might get away with it. Connecting three to the same output would be a bad idea as you would almost certainly try and draw too much power through the board on sharp changes of speed!
• DiddyBorg Red Edition motors:
  ZeroBorg will happily drive a single one of these per output, but it will definitely not tolerate two per output. In short you could use four Red Edition motors (one per output) at most with a ZeroBorg.
• MonsterBorg motors:
  ZeroBorg is not up to the task of driving these at all, they are far too powerful for the board! They require a more powerful board such as our ThunderBorg.

In all three cases you would probably be better off with our ThunderBorg controller for a six motor robot. This will cope with all three motors per side for the micro or Red Edition motors. From memory it is only really capable of two MonsterBorg motors per output though.

5. In short yes, there would be a difference between the single motor and the pair. Under most circumstances they will be similar enough to be ignored, but there are exceptions:

• If the controller or batteries are struggling to supply enough power to all six motors then the pairs will see a larger power drop than the single motors
• If one of the pair is off the ground so it can run faster it will speed up and slow the other motor in the pair down
• Similarly if one of the pair has a stuck wheel it can use most of the power up, slowing the other motor in the pair down significantly

in most cases though you would be hard pressed to notice the difference. What I would suggest is that if you do go for a pair and a single on the same side use the singles for the central wheels on each side as they do most of the work in a six wheel robot when turning on the spot.