Thread: witricity legality?
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Unread 27-03-2008, 20:22
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AKA: Jason Brett
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Re: witricity legality?
Rather than planning this as a power transmission method for a FIRST robot drivetrain, where robustness and reliability are paramount, this sounds like a great science fair project.

If you do your research and start building prototypes and testing them now then you will not only have a good science fair project, but... if you can move more than 40 amps through the ether with minimal losses, then you will have something that your team can check against the FRC rules for legality.

Just keep in mind, however, that transmitting current is quite different from transmitting voltage. Also keep in mind that when a CIM is drawing 40amps at 10 volts, that is 400 watts of power. If you have a 40% power loss then you have 160 watts of heat showing up somewhere. Any compact, lightweight system is going to start getting really hot, really fast.

So if you are interested in this system, study it. Research it. Test it. And should you get it to the stage where you can use it in an FRC robot, then worry about what the FRC rules are. Even if it doesn't work for FRC, it will still be a very cool science fair project.

Jason