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Unread 16-11-2008, 02:14
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dtengineering dtengineering is offline
Teaching Teachers to Teach Tech
AKA: Jason Brett
no team (British Columbia FRC teams)
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Join Date: Jan 2005
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Location: Vancouver, BC
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Re: Mecanum Drive Train

Quote:
Originally Posted by gorrilla View Post
you could use the banebot transmission, they are pretty fast(when directly driven to the wheel) although reliability is an
issue
Sigh... reliability is not an issue with the CIM planetary gearbox from Banebots. At least no more so than for any other gearbox used in FRC. There was a problem with their first batch of trannies, which, unfortunately, got shipped out as part of the KoP two years ago. Banebots went to great expense and effort to fix the problem in time for competitions and has further improved their product since then. Unfortunately it is the nature of (many) people to remember the initial problem, rather than the excellent committment to service and subsequent improvements that Banebots has made. We were one of the first teams to identify a problem in the original KoP trannies, and have since taken advantage of the free upgrade that BB offered to ALL FRC teams and have been running BB trannies on our mecanum for the last two years with no issues.

In fact BB trannies, or other direct connect transmissions (where the wheel is mounted directly to the output shaft) make for, in my experience, the most reliable drivetrain as the most common point of failure... the chain or belt... is eliminated from the system. Just make sure the output shaft is supported on the outboard side of the wheel!

An additional advantage of the BB trannies is that you can order them in a wide range of gear ratios, and can convert from one ratio to another (with some limitations) if you aren't happy with the performance.

Yep. There was a problem with the Banebots trannies two years ago that was quite disruptive. But it is hardly fair to question the reliability of the current trannies given the fact that BB stood behind their product, solved the problem in short order, upgraded over 3,000 trannies for free, and has since improved them even more.

Jason