I'll see Jim next tuesday and see what he's doing with the whitepaper. It's not out yet. I'll try to get some closeups at IRI
This page has some info on it.
Random tidbits that I can think of:
-It's obviously 2 two speed trannies in series
-It's made with a lathe and a mill....or a drill press with a moving table.
-The gears are heat treated pinion rod. We turned them down on the lathe and had them heat treated.
-Yes, the gears will be fine if you heat treat them, and we filed the edges a bit just to be safe. You wouldn't want to use this method if you were designing a transmission for a go kart or something, but for the amount of time a robot is used, it should be fine. We went to three regionals, nationals, and will attend 3 offseasons.
-The side panels are polycarbonate of some sort
-That is actually a big version of the tranny in the picture. It can be compressed down to roughly half the size by staggering the shafts rather than having them in a straight line.
-The automation code uses a shaft encoder that is actually in the transmission, but our demo used banner sensors. Same concept, it bases the shifting on the output RPM.
-There is obviously no motor matching in it, we used #35 chain to match the speeds of the drill gearboxes in low and chips, exactly like the martians (494) did in 2003, and put the output into the transmission
-The transmissions can be mounted between the wheels
-The motor pan/mounts weighed about a pound, it was a folded sheet of aluminum.
-You can also make a rock solid, feather light 2 speed transmission with this method, just build half of it.
Here's something I threw together in Paint, it would be our robot's drivetrain this year if it wasn't for the climbing system.