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Unread 09-03-2009, 17:12
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Pat Fairbank Pat Fairbank is offline
Circuit Breaker
FRC #0254 (The Cheesy Poofs)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Rookie Year: 2001
Location: San Jose, CA
Posts: 2,132
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Re: Gyroscopic Steering?

Quote:
Originally Posted by purduephotog View Post
At the Rochester Regional there was one team with a tiny gyro that was designed to assist with steering- but it had been removed due to weight restrictions. -by Tiny I mean 6lb, maybe 10" in diameter. Mechanical Gyro, not electronic.

A search for 'gyroscopic steering' or 'gyro steering' don't turn up any useful hits- so I'm hoping someone will have a link or post to exactly that.

We're going to off-season build up our gyro using one of the old 3.5" cims - lets see how that works!
Quote:
Originally Posted by computerboi1503 View Post
On the topic of Gyroscopes, we tried using one that the disc weight was near 10.5 lbs, and spun at a high rate of speed. I'm sure if Pat sees this thread he can give more accurate numbers. Anyways, we tried it, played with it all season, and it just was not effective enough, given our weight constraints. If we had a heavier disc we probably could have made it work.
Yep, you are probably talking about us. 7 lbs. steel, somewhere around 10" in diameter, attached to one of our old swerve modules from 2007 for easy rotation. It was powered by an AndyMark FP planetary at 1:1, spinning at somewhere around 3000 RPM. Rotation of the gyro assembly was done with a Globe motor.

We played with it on and off throughout the build season, trying to decide if it was worth the effort making a competition-legal assembly, before scrapping it somewhere around ship. It did have a pronounced effect on robot turning, but we deemed it not enough to be worth the extra weight, as well as the fact that it moved our centre of gravity much farther forward than we wanted. We brought the gyro assembly to FLR to display in case anyone was interested.
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