Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence
Any reason for the custom 1/4" plate drivetrain? I've never seen one like it before. Worked beautifully for you guys.
|
Interesting story, glad you asked.
I got the sideplate idea from 125, I could be wrong but I believe they've been doing a sideplate style drive since 2007.
Anyway, as for why choose a sideplate style drive was because it lined up best with what machining resources we had. Last year our resources were mainly me using a sponsors shop with cnc controlled bridgeports, engine lathes, and basically everything you could want in a shop. In addition to my shop use we had some basic hand tools at the school and I talked to one of our sponsors (Mori Seiki) to cnc some parts for us. So essentially we had two machinists in two shops making our robot.
The original plan for 2013 was to make a WCD. I talked to my contact at Mori Seiki and went over some WCD part drawings with him. He felt that it would be a waste of a resource to make WCD siderails on their equipment, as they can be machined manually pretty easily. So we settled that if we were to do a WCD the only parts Mori would make would be the wheels, which left everything else for me to make which I thought was less than ideal. Thus was born the siderail design, which was designed to be easily made given our resources. We had Mori do our siderails and wheels and all I had to make was standoffs, assemble the wheels and make the bellypan.
Long story short, everything took really long to make and we didn't have a drivetrain till around week 4. This was mainly because we didn't have the time to test a siderail style drivetrain during the offseason, so we ran into a lot of issues with machining and assembly. But it all paid off and last year was the first year the drivetrain didn't fail during a match! It lasted two regionals, made it to Einstein, and won two offseasons before it finally popped a chain. The only other issue it had was when an ethernet cable got tangled in the chain, which was fixed.
Anyway, this year we've lined up a million machine shops to sponsor us and are going to make a WCD. As well as our drivetrain worked last year it took too long to make and design. I can design a WCD in my sleep and we can send off parts to be made quickly giving us more time to focus on subsystem design. Designing an original drivetrain was great, but this year we're sticking to our team motto: steal from the best and invent the rest. WCDs are proven and easy to make when you have the right sponsors, which we do now.
Sorry to threadjack.
Thanks,
-Adrian