pic: 1156 Off season Fisher-Price gearbox

[Henrique Schmit]

Originally Posted by Nuttyman54

The gears inside the "stock" FP gearbox are plastic. It looks like the 1156 actually used the first stage gears straight from that here.

The FP motor is an air-cooled motor (like the AM-9015 and the BaneBots motors). If it stops spinning it loses its cooling and burns up very quickly. This is also the first stage off the motor, and this motor does not generate a lot of torque off the shaft (high speed, low torque). The motor will stall long before the plastic gear strips, and then you let the magic smoke out and that lovely burnt motor smell fills the air.

Offseason on CD is filled with so many drivetrain ideas and prototypes that we tend to forget not every project that gets posted is for a drivetrain. The output of this gearbox is far better suited to an intake or shooter wheel than it is something like a drivetrain.

You got the right idea. We did in fact use the plastic gear from the FP gearbox to simplify the design and avoid having to produce a gear since in our lab we don't have the necessary tools and so we'd need a sponsor to do that for us. This gearbox is designed for high speed and low torque applications, for example shooting or collecting game pieces.

The gearbox was designed as part of a project to build a budget robot that would play the 2012 game, since we felt that we didn't perform well that year and it would be a good learning experience. We're focusing more on learning how to better design game mechanisms instead of focusing on designing a new drivetrain since we feel that the drivetrain we have fits our budget well and has enough power already, so having a better scoring mechanism would help us more. When the design is completed i'll post a render of it here on CD