Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
I agree with you that ANY gearbox is legal. The only legal Motor/gearbox combo that you buy together are the ones that Banebots sell that have the 545 motor on it. Note that because the kit has a naked 545 motor in addition to the motor/gearbox combo in the kit, you can really us TWO of any gearbox that uses the 545 motor*.
The implication of the above is that you can basically buy any 36mm or 42mm gearbox for your robot.
In fact, you COULD use up to 4 of them pretty easily: 2 to use the motors Banebots put in the kit (the RS-545 motor and the motor/Gearbox) plus 2 for the Fisher Price motors (trust me, you will be happy you used the Banebot grearbox rather than the plastic FP gearbox -- smaller, easy to mount, easier to get torque out of, easier to pick the ratio you really want, just plain better all the way around -- all for $40 and about 15 minutes of your time - highly recommended).
Joe J.
*by the way, notice that you get a 64:1 motor/gearbox in the kit. I strongly recommend that inexperienced teams buy the conversion kit to make that gearbox a 16:1 setup. If you design with the 16:1 ratio and you guess wrong (like we all do at some point), then you can easily go up or down in gear ratio by a factor of 4: You can go up to the original ratio of 64:1 or you can spend $10 and go down to a 4:1 ratio. Believe me, having options that day before shipping is like having gold in the bank. You'll want it, trust me. JJ |
Wow, I completely forgot that they included two RS-545 motors. Looks like I'll be ordering another 64:1 gearbox tomorrow....
Good idea with the conversion kit, I ordered one today. I also recommend getting different size wheel sprockets from IFI or AndyMark, and bringing them to the competition. That way if you feel like you are lacking speed, or torque when you're out there, then you can just swap out a bigger sprocket (more torque), or a smaller sprocket (more speed). You might have to leave some slack on the chain though, or add a section with another masterlink that you can add/take out a certain amount of chain to compensate for a smaller/bigger sprocket.
It's little things like this that means a win or lose at the competition.