Help with Gearboxes

[Suneet]

Weight? Well, you can use some pretty thin metal (.25 in Al 2024-T4 for me) and with lean construction the weight should be reasonable. But yeah, one box per side probably would be lighter.

when thinking about shifting on the fly, keep in mind, that for all practical purposes, this is only accomplised by using a Pneumatic. This is the bad part. I too like team 60's four gearboxes, but that is the problem. They have four gearboxes. If you have four gearboxes, shifting each one, you have just used four pneumatics, which leaves you with only one for use anywhere else on the robot. For many teams this year, only having one pneumatic usable, they would not have been able to release the goals, like 60.

60 doesn't really shift on the fly, but I've seen their boxes up close at a workshop. Wonderfully simple+reliable mechinism, you've got to hand it to them... Actually, someone proposed running levers to the boxes so all could run off one cylinder. I think this would be way too complex, but if you need the pneumatics for something else, I have some ideas with springs, motors ,and cables...