Motor Diagnostics Dashboard
Read the telemetry off a mechanism's motors and find the one that is working harder than the rest. Binding shows up here long before anything breaks.
Inputs
One row per motor on the same mechanism, read while it is under a representative load. The V5 brain reports all three figures, and so do VEXcode and PROS.
Results
Anything wrong?
—
Motor to look at
—
Current imbalance
—%
Spread across the group.
Hottest motor
—
Motors being thermally limited
—
Average current
—A
Closest to the 2.5 A limit
—A
Motors read
—
Motor by motor
| Motor | Current | vs average | Temp | Thermal state | Efficiency | Reading |
|---|
How this is calculated
Motors on the same mechanism, geared the same way, should draw about the same current. When one draws noticeably more, it is doing more of the work, and that is almost always mechanical rather than electrical.
What the pattern means
- High current with low efficiency is the signature of binding. The motor is putting energy in and not getting motion out, so it is going into heat instead. Look for a misaligned shaft, a bearing without a bearing block, gears meshed too tightly, or a bent axle.
- High current with normal efficiency means that motor is simply carrying more load. Usually uneven weight distribution, or one side of a drive fighting the other because of a slightly different ratio.
- Low current with low efficiency often means the motor is barely engaged: a slipping gear, a stripped shaft, or a loose collar letting it spin without driving anything.
- Hot but balanced across every motor is not a fault. It means the mechanism is genuinely working hard and needs more reductionor more motors.
With your numbers
Temperature lags the problem
Current responds immediately and temperature takes tens of seconds, so current imbalance is the early warning and heat is the confirmation. A motor pulling twice its neighbours will be flagged here long before it is hot enough for the brain to complain.
That matters because thermal limiting is not gentle. Once past55°C the motor is cut to half current, then a quarter, then an eighth. A drive whose one binding motor starts derating mid-match will pull to one side, which drivers usually report as a handling problem rather than a motor problem.
Reading it properly
Take the numbers under load, not while idle, since an unloaded motor draws almost nothing and every reading looks fine. Run the mechanism through its normal range, hold it against a realistic load, and read all the motors at the same moment.
Sources & assumptions
The 2.5 A per-motor current limit and the four thermal steps are VEX published figures, as is the55°C point at which limiting begins. The5°C spacing between later steps isestimated, since VEX does not publish it.
Assumes every motor listed drives the same mechanism through the same gearing. Comparing motors on different subsystems, or on different ratios, will flag differences that are supposed to be there.
Efficiency as reported by VEXos is a useful relative signal between motors read at the same moment. Comparing it against readings taken at another time, or at a different load, is not meaningful.
- Purdue SIGBots Wiki — VEX Motors — checked 2026-08-17
- VEX Robotics — V5 Smart Motor & Gear Cartridges (276-4840) — checked 2026-08-17
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