FRC Design- Tips, Tricks, and Effective Methods

[magnets]

Designing FIRST robots is a very unique challenge. In some aspects, the robots are exposed to large, unexpected, and often damaging forces and loads. On the other hand, these machines need only to run for 100 hours, so teams have found all sorts of tricks that may seem very unconventional to typical design engineers that they can get away with and succeed in FRC. There are also many "normal" designs that are common among successful teams. This thread is a place to share any mechanical design tips, tricks, or methods that apply to FRC robot design.

Introducing my friend, a design engineer, to FIRST showed how unique some elements of robot design are. To this day, he cannot get over using an aluminum sprocket with steel chain.

Some examples that I've learned from CD are -aluminum gears, aluminum sprockets, 118 style chain in tube, 254's zip tie encoder mount, roller bearing and teflon pad elevators, Aren Hill's choo choo linkage, 67/254's smooth bumper material, somebody's method of using a hex sleeve as a removable coupling between gearbox and transmission, 254's (I think?) method of freezing the main breaker with upside down cans of canned air so it doesn't trip.