Quote:
Originally Posted by sanddrag
We have a Versalaser that is handy for all sorts of things. It sees very little use for the FRC robot itself, but we use it for small mini-sumo robots for class projects and for engraving giveaways. We have done 1/4" ABS on it but it did not turn out great. Right now I have a problem where the laser is weak and struggling to cut 1/8" acrylic. Need to check it out and get it fixed.
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Lens might be dirty. At least with the epilog, the lens needs to be cleaned every so often.
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We love our laser cutter. We use it for tons of stuff, mainly with ABS. Our team considered ABS gearbox plates, although we did not actually do it because we were using supershifters for the first time and did not want to take the risk. We still believe that it would work out, though.
We did use ABS for other things on our robot this year. All of our sprockets were made using it, and worked really well. Plus they were lightweight.
We had linear actuators consisting of a double pulley moving up and down aluminum c-channel. The entire pulley module was made out of ABS, and although we had problems with them, the problems did not stem from our choice to use ABS.
We then created an ABS template which we used to lay it on top of all the layers of our wood and polycarb arm and drilled in all of the holes. Without the template, it would have been nearly impossible to manually sketch out the dimensions of each and every hole.
Our frisbees traveled down a curved path on our arm. We used stacks of .25in ABS as rails to guide the frisbees. There is absolutely no other way in our capabilities that we could have machined such a thing.
Our wrist was 75% ABS. Besides increased machining capabilities, this also allowed us to have a lightweight wrist.
Finally, we lasercut our "daisy" floor pickups using rubber. What the rubber basically did was whack the frisbee into the arm.
In sum, we basically used the laser cutter and ABS for 2 main reasons: to give our low resource team machining capabilities comparable to high resource teams and to create lightweight components. Next year, we have even bigger plans for this amazing machine.