Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

I'm extremely sorry if this thread was already made, but...

How do i attach a sproket onto a fisher price motor for use to rotate my arm?
[i heard fisher price motors are the strongest?]

The only way i could think of was to detach the motor from the given gear box and gear down the motor myself. Please i have been thinking about it for three days and i am still lost!

:confused: :confused: :confused:

BTW i read this forum everyday, and i see nothing on my problem )=

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Couple ways. You can get a hold of the FP couplers that were in the kit last year. (for some reason, there is an inordinate amount of FP toy cars in the trash. You can find one) it isn't terribly difficult to bolt a sprocket to one of those.

You could also cut slots in a sprocket to mesh to the white piece on the FP gearbox. be careful if you put a lot of tension in the chain though or try to get some more support for the sprocket; I'm not sure about loading that white piece radially.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Perhaps you could get a planetary from www.andymark.biz and then use the kit gearbox.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

As much as i would like to purchase a pre-made gear box from andymark /=,

i really want to do my own gear box for my fisher price motor.

Does anybody know where i can purchase cheap, reliable planetary gears and small gears to construct my own gear box?'

I understand i have to gear down at least 124:1 to use the fisher price motor, so im planning on using 80 teeth gears with 13 teeth gears 3 times, but i don't understand the terms of a gear. What are the specs for the FP motor gear(without the given gear box)? [i.e. bore, face width, pitch diameter, face width, Diametral Pitch. hub diameter, Outside Diameter, pressure angle?


Oh yeah, Max, about your reply, i do have a coupler from 2004 but is bolting a sprocket onto that palstic sprocket strong enough?


I'm still uninformed )=

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

SDP-SI sells internal gears which I assume could be used as the ring gears in a planetary set, but you may want to confirm that with an engineer.

Is this the way to make a planetary? Buy an internal gear and then some small spurs for planets and sun?

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Or you could use belts pulleys :D

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Dont use the FP motor for an arm. Arm motors generally have to take a lot of stress, and the FP motors have plastic gears. Thats just what im thinking. Belts wouldnt work for the same reason obviously.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

What motor do you suggest we use?

I was thinking the only other motor that could handle the torque might be the globe motor;then again, i would need to buy my own gears and machine my own gear box. right?

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

I would have to disagree with russell there. The Fisher Price motor is definitely capable of powering an arm mechanism; plastic gears shouldn't be a concern if you are building your own gearbox.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

we used fp last year in our arm to pick up the big ball. If you want to use them you need to watch the heat on them. We burnt threw a few. YOu might even think about building heatsinks for them and invest in one of the guns that takes the heat measurements. Fps can be done if they are monitored closely and checked after every match

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

We're considering the Fisher price gear box for the arm. It needs additional reduction. Heat is only a problem if you over load it. The back drive problem is my main concern. We're looking at different brake designs.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

We have had good luck in re-using the plastic gears from the F-P gearbox in a custom made gearbox. We basically made our own side plates. (You'll need a mill for this) Don't use the last set of gears on the F-P gearbox. Instead, make a shaft with a hex shaped outside to fit into the second-to-last gear from the F-P assembly. This shaft will then rotate with the second-to-last gear and it can be used as your output. You'll need more reduction after that. It the past we used a big sprocket (about 10") attached to the arm and put a small sprocket on the gearbox output.

To calculate the final reduction you will need to figure out how much moment (torque) you will have at the base of the arm using the length and weight of a fully loaded arm. A good rule of thumb that I like to use is to keep the motor load less than 1/3 of the stall torque. So, if you divide the required toque at the base of the arm by 1/3 the stall torque of the F-P motor you will get a target for the overall reduction.

Matt B

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

OK, fair enough. Here is some advice:

Look inside of the Bosch gearbox from last year (or previous years), and you will find all of the gears you need to build your very own single-stage reduction gearbox. The ring gears, planet gears, and pin-plate that holds the planet gears are all in there. Unfortuneately, the sun gear (pinion) has a larger id (5mm), as the Bosch shaft was bigger than the F-P motor shaft.

These are the parts used on the TechnoKats last year to make our own Fisher-Price gearbox. We had to fabricate a housing, an output shaft that mated up with the pin-plate, and a new 15-tooth gear (we used 36dp). We used an 8mm id needle bearing to support the output shaft. This bearing failed during our summer competition (after 3 competitions of qualifying and elimination rounds), so Mark and I simply added a second bearing in our AndyMark design.

Good luck,
Andy B.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

A Fisher Price Motor with stock plastic gearbox SHOULD hold up to your basic arm needs. This is relative to what you are doing, though. If you are trying to pick up 60 pounds on an arm with a 60" swing, with no reduction to the rotation axle, you will stall the motor, probably smoking it, and possibly grinding the gears inside the plastic gearbox.

I recommend using JV N's motor calculator to find out how much torque your arm requires, then choosing the motor in the kit with the corresponding peak power.

(For reference, many teams were able to hang 130 pound robots off a FP motor with stock gearbox, without killing the motor or the gears.)

My opinion is.. make sure you need the power of the FP first. If you dont, opt for the van door. It is more reliable and not as picky as the FP. But, if it turns out you need the FP, make sure you give yourself about a week of testing on the arm. Then you can find any quirks, and see if something will go wrong. If the motor overheating becomes a problem, limit the voltage to about 9.6 - 10.5 volts. If the gearbox begins to grind, fabricate your own, using either nylon or aluminum side plates, and gears ordered off the INTERNET. You can construct this gearbox in any high school machine shop. If needed, post or search to get info about making your own custom FP gearbox.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

im new to this
but couldnt you use the window motor or maybe 2 window motors to power a fixed shaft at a joint

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Team 60 and 254 both used fisher price motors (with big black FP gearbox) to drive their arms last year. Check out the pics, they could probably give you advice on how to use FP motors on an arm.

Here are some pictures of team 254

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

I'd second this. Team 95 used FP's last year to drive their arm (see Pic 1 and Pic 2) , and they worked fairly well, but they do burnt out rather easily. Careful design or limiting the voltage range is a good idea. Chilling them between matches helps a lot too in a pinch.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

What a great idea!!!

I am going to dissemble my motor immediately to find the bore and sprocket i need to gear down to compensate for my last gear in the FP gearbox!

thanks MAtt, i really appreciate it. (=

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Do you guys have access to a mill? If so I envy you. You know the only time I have ever even seen a mill in person was in the portable machine shop at the portland regional last year? And I want to be a machinist too.... I think I am gonna buy that really cheap grizzly drill/mill. Thats not the point. When I said you shouldnt use the FP motor clearly I was wrong, and I should point out our team didnt use them last year (our first year) so I realy wouldnt know.

What we did do last year was use the window motor to drive a sprocket which drove the shaft our arm was on. It worked pretty well too, especialy after we put in some springs to act as counter weights without the weight. The problem was that there was no chain tensioner, so when this one genius got the idea to run a chunk of 1" square thick wall aluminum through the sprocket it cost us about a day. Anyway that worked pretty well, and we cut the power by a factor of three (in the program) and we can still pick up trash cans and chairs and such. The arm had a good ten pounds of pneumatics and such on it too. If you want strong, those motors got strong. This is the best pic I could find just now. The arm drive I am talking about is on the left side of the picture and the motor is almost cut off.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

We used the window motor last year with an additional 13:1 reduction. It can lift a tetra however we need more power this year for the arm. The van door and the window together are looking good. We used a 1/4" dryer belt. The belt will slip if the arm is pinned. This is good.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

In my pinion, if you are going to use the standard F-P transmission, you should use the standard F-P coupler.

The best part is from the Jeep model as I recall because they have 10 spokes rather than the more typical 5.

Also, drill the shaft out from the strange dim. that the axle of the Jeep is to something normal - 1/2 inch works great in my opinion.

To attach a sprocket to the coupler, I recommend bolting (or welding) a sprocket to a thin disk that is the size of the ridge of the coupler (about 4 inches in diameter) and then bolting that disk to the coupler. It has worked great for us in the past. See the picture below.

Joe J.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Anyone have good/bad experience using the FP gearbox and coupler as a cantilever without supporting the end of the shaft? We've always added a support and bearing there because we were afraid that too much deformation in the plastic gears and housing would cause premature failure or demating, but I just wondered if anyone has relied on the stiffness of the coupler for adequate support. Joe I can't tell if you have a support plate there on not in your photo.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Another easy light weight way to attach to the FP ccoupler is to buy an aluminum belt pulley about 4" in diameter and machine off half of it, leaving the part of the pulley with the keyway and set screw. Drill matching holes in the pulley and the FP coupler and bolt toegther.

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

Well, I dont really want to start a new thread for this as it is almost the same question. Here it is:

We are going to have an arm this year (obviously), and after reviewing the motor specs I have decided that we are going to have to use the Fisher Price motor, because of its torque. Our arm is going to be about five feet long (although it will also be able to extend to more like seven) and will need to be able to hold a sprocket on the end. The whole arm assembly should not weigh more than about ten pounds, and we will use springs as a counterweight. Basically our drive for the arm will need about 40-50 foot pounds of torque. Now I am looking at how to gear it. We will have to use two sets of sprockets, one of which (the higher speed, lower torque one) will use bicycle sprockets and a bicycle chain. Assuming that this set of sprockets gives about 1.2:1 reduction (I know it isnt much but we dont want much), and the other will give us 4.5:1 reduction the math would indicate that the arm should be turning about 20rpm assuming no load.

Now my question is how fast do you think it will actually be turning? With friction and load and all that? We will definetly use the 4.5:1 reduction set up, but what reduction should I use for the other stage if I want the arm to turn about 20rpm, or maybe a little bit less?

Thanks,
Russell
WRONG Team 1430

Re: Fisher Price used on Arm?
 

We utilized the same Bosch planetary last year by creating an adapter shaft with an interference fit and pressing it onto the FP. Although we used the whole transmission so most people at first glance thought we had 4 drill motors on our bot.

On the other hand this year we prefered a more direct mode to send the FP power into our transmission. I think many of you will enjoy the simplicity of how we use them this year...

Pete