Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

...almost nothing actually.

Many of you stopped by the pits in Atlanta to look at our Dewalt drill transmission and our modifications that allow us to drive the drill transmission with either a Chiaphua motor, Bosch drill motor, Fisher Price motor, Globe motor, or Keyang motor.

I told many of you that I was worried half to death that this transmission would end up being not as robust as I had hoped and then I would have 8 times as many problems. But in actual fact, we had almost zero problems with this transmissions. With 3 competitions on our "real" robot and hours and hours on our practice robot, I can't think of a single time we took a transmission off the robot because we had a problem with the motor or the transmission. I have never had as few problems with gearboxes and motors on a FIRST robot.

I am definitely going to be publishing a paper on these transmissions this summer. With some luck, we may even make contact with Dewalt in time to get some of these beauties in the kit next year.

They were awesome.

Joe J.

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

There is some backlash, but to be honest, it is not all that much. With #35 Chain, it was often on the order of magnitude of our chain slack (if we let it get loose, which we did from time to time).

But, yes, the additional backlash can cause some problems for control loops at times. It is not that bad though. We ended up either living with the oscillations or adding damping to the system. The only joint we took steps to do something about were are fingers -- they are over powered and very lightly damped. We actually used some set screws on our finger axles, not to transfer torque (which everyone knows sucks) but to add drag to our pivots so that the extra damping removed the oscillations -- not exactly elegant but it worked.

Joe J.

Originally Posted by JVN

Joe,
I saw the "magic" in Atlanta and was very impressed.
I'm just wondering how long until you have that whitepaper out?

I understand you're busy (aren't we all)... but I'm eager to learn more.

Thanks in Advance,
John

Originally Posted by maxlobovsky

Well, considering how much I want to see this white paper and how much I want people to contribue to FIRSTwiki, why not combine the two? You might consider starting a page like [[DeWalt gearbox adaptation]] where you, and other team 47 members could build up a page and eventually save it as a PDF and put it on CD or do whatever else you like with it. Just a thought :)