Quote:
Originally Posted by animenerdjohn
How can you do a drivetrain presentation without JVN of 148? I mean 148 won worlds with a non-skid drivetrain, which in itself is impressive if you look at history - but on top of that they invented 9 wheel drive and helped spearhead the new articulating drive method. 148 and JVN work with IFI who designed and makes the most popular traction wheels available. I'm not trying to put them on a pedestal, but I feel like having them in the discussion would be beneficial.
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As others have already mentioned, John's done a lot of great things to advance the art of effective drive design. The IFI product line is top notch and offers a lot to FIRST teams and his design calculator spreadsheet is a tremendous asset -- maybe the best thing he's ever done, as far as I'm concerned.
The nonadrive is cool, though articulating drives have been around for ages and have seen all sorts of uses. Those that spring to mind immediately include 157 in 1999, 810 in 2002, and 358 in 2003, but finding pictures of any of those might be impossible these days. I'm sure there've been a lot more.
Back in the day, we couldn't just log onto the internet and mail order a bunch of awesome gearboxes and wheels. We barely even had an internet, actually. The consequence was that teams operated in far more of a vacuum than they do now and there was a much greater variety of robot designs -- for better and for worse.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and I wish that we would've had the foresight to better document the earlier years of FIRST robots. There was a lot of awesome work going on -- teams were more closely aligned with their sponsors in those times -- and a lot of really interesting designs saw the spotlight.