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Originally Posted by LeelandS
Okay, so after a rather long, humorous and somewhat vulgar conversation with Gregor on the subject, I guess I understand this whole "Butterfly Drive" thing now. Appropriate changes will begin being made to my working copy of the log.
P.S. I really don't think we need a new name for this thing. Half the conversation was me ranting about how it doesn't make any sense to name it something totally different just because it uses different wheels on a virtually identical system.
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They are, in fact, very different. Octocanum is an omnidirectional drivetrain. Butterfly is not... unless you add a 9th "slide" wheel - in which case it becomes Nonadrive, which is yet a third flavor.
Now, that being said - you could lump all three of these into "articulating drivetrains", which is how we categorize them on 148. We have done all three styles (Nonadrive in 2010, Butterfly in 2011/13, Octocanum for an offseason project before 2011). The Nonadrive is the original, created by a couple 148 students in fall 2009, and that inspired all the subsequent variations.