Designing idler arrangements to dictate a toothed belt's skipping behavior
Do skippings of a toothed belt only depend on how much angle the belt wraps around the driving/driven pulley, or does the entry/exit angle matter?
In other words, when there's a toothed belt loop where the driven axle is arranged right above the driving axle, and the driving axle can rotate in either way, in order to get a symmetric skipping behavior, do you need to arrange two idlers in symmetry, or can you get away with a single idler?
I asked two LLMs, but being clankers they are with absolutely no spatial awareness, afaict (unless I'm having grave misunderstandings in the terminologies) they kept mixing up CW/CCW rotations and tight/slack enterings to each pulley :D And eventually, they did reach the same conclusion, but they were giving different reasons.
(Additional question: Suppose I made an exaggerated configuration and arranged the idlers on the right side on both spans, so that the spans looked like < <. Which way of the bottom driving axle's rotation would be more likely to cause skip, CW or CCW?
I'm getting confused again with this one, because ignoring the gravity and assuming the belt is only carrying the tension T, the pulleys are gonna simply experience the tension as if the other pulley is installed a bit leftwards?)
If it matters, the rotation is going to be very slow, ~5 RPM.