2-Speed vs 1-Speed drivetrain

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Abhishek R

So this year we ran a two-speed 4 CIM drive with auto-shifting, geared about ~11 in low and 16 or 17 in high, on 4 inch wheels. With the current auto shifting setup, would it be beneficial to make the low gear lower to accelerate faster?



So what was your 2014 setup like? I didn't see it to much in the pits, but it was definitely one of the fastest robots I saw this year.

So would an ideal system (barring weight and other limiting factors) be a 6 CIM two-gear drive, the low being only used for pushing, and high gear for everything else? I think this is what 254 used this year.

I can understand why you asked about moving to a lower gear to accelerate faster. Much like a car, if I was seeing how fast I could go from dead stop starting in 1st gear vs. 3rd gear, you start with 1st gear due to the torque advantage.
I'm saying that instead, ideally you have the 1 speed that you are comfortable with and use an adequate amount of motors to get the power you need to achieve that speed you gear it for.
Shifting into a real low gear was an option for us to try and get through pushing matches when the traffic was bad and we were busy trying to acquire and position ourselves to shoot the ball. We would have been perfectly happy with a 1 speed setup if it wasnt for this scenario.
All of our defensive maneuvers were using the higher 1 speed.
Our drive was much more effective adding just 1 Banebot 775 to each side. We took AM SuperShifters and modified one end of the plates, added the BB, and the right gears to match the 2 CIMs.
We had none of the 6 CIM issues that teams complained about during the season. Next season, we plan to add....