View Single Post
  #7   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 21-01-2006, 20:59
Jared Russell's Avatar
Jared Russell Jared Russell is offline
Taking a year (mostly) off
FRC #0254 (The Cheesy Poofs), FRC #0341 (Miss Daisy)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Nov 2002
Rookie Year: 2001
Location: San Francisco, CA
Posts: 3,077
Jared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond reputeJared Russell has a reputation beyond repute
Re: pneumatics for 2006 competition?

Last year, Miss Daisy left off a compressor for weight reasons and instead used pre-charged tanks for gear shifting the AndyMark gearbox. We turned down the regulator to 25 psi or so (the lowest we could go and still shift reliably) and did some experimentation to figure out how many good shifts we could make.

The program then limited the automatic transmission to 35 or so gear shifts before locking into low for the rest of the round (in practice, seldom did we use more than 20).

In retrospect, we should have used servos, but we didn't have time to outfit them to work.

In general, the more you use pneumatics the more efficient it is in terms of weight - you only pay the price of the compressors, tanks, and regulators once, while additional cylinders can be quite light.