Need general drive train expertise

[Oblarg]

I have never met a single person who believed that shifting with servos was a good idea.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I have never met a single person who believed that shifting with servos was a good idea.

I'd qualify that by saying that there are plenty of commonly-available servos that can do the job, but they haven't historically been FRC-legal. Digital servos for giant-scale model aircraft would be great, for example. Saving the weight and annoyance of a pneumatic system could make it very worthwhile.

(I've tried shifting a DeWalt-based transmission with FRC-legal servos before. It was terrible.)

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

I'd qualify that by saying that there are plenty of commonly-available servos that can do the job, but they haven't historically been FRC-legal. Digital servos for giant-scale model aircraft would be great, for example. Saving the weight and annoyance of a pneumatic system could make it very worthwhile.

Oh, certainly, I've worked with some beefy servos in other applications. I was only talking about FRC-legal hardware.

Unfortunately, FRC-legal servos are so weak that I've yet to actually find an application for them. I'm sure someone, somewhere has used them effectively on their robot, but I haven't.

[RonnieS]

I know 67 has used a window motor configuration in the past because they did not have pneumatics. Using an opposing cam, it pushes or pulls into high or low gear.

Here is the link to their engineering notebook, I recommend any reads all of them anyways

-Ronnie

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Unfortunately, FRC-legal servos are so weak that I've yet to actually find an application for them. I'm sure someone, somewhere has used them effectively on their robot, but I haven't.

FRC0330, back in '05 and I think in '00.

Both were used as latches, and as I recall the one from '00 had some assistance from a spring. (Used to lock a winch with a pin--might have been replaced by a short-throw cylinder.) The one in '05 was rigged to drop a thin sheet of Lexan. Why a thin sheet of Lexan, you ask? It's really nice to be able to deny someone who is trying to jam you against a goal half of their traction. There was no retract mechanism, though.

[MrBasse]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Oh, certainly, I've worked with some beefy servos in other applications. I was only talking about FRC-legal hardware.

Unfortunately, FRC-legal servos are so weak that I've yet to actually find an application for them. I'm sure someone, somewhere has used them effectively on their robot, but I haven't.

We used them to make our scale model of Dozer look left or right with his eyes when steering, other than that I've got nothing.

[Alan Anderson]

Servos controlled the pan/tilt of our camera in 2007. Tracking the green light over the rack was vital to the robot's success in scoring during autonomous.

2005's camera also had a pan servo, but a combination of factors led to our abandoning vision tracking that year.

There was a servo-controlled release on our 2004 fabric ball-collecting funnel, but we decided to leave the funnel off after our first couple of practice matches. We wanted to focus on knocking the 10-point yellow ball off its pedestal to drop the 5-point balls early.