AndyMark Parts Feedback 2015

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

If you open up the PG-188 gearbox, the shaft has a couple of triangular notches in them. That's where ours broke. I'm not sure if they're put there to create a known failure mode or not. If so, I'm guessing the thinking is that it's relatively simple and cheap to replace the shaft rather than the gear assembly.

That was my guess, too, though if this is the case the fact that AndyMark doesn't seem to sell the output shaft separately on their website is a bit of a headscratcher.

[Pretzel]

Our lift mechanism was powered by a Raw Box in order to prevent backdriving. With the Talons for the two motors (Rs-775's with CIM-ilies) set to brake mode, no additional current was required to prevent a six tote stack with bin and noodle from backdriving the motors.

We did have one issue, however, with the holes for mounting the motors. Both of our Raw Boxes required us to drill out the mounting holes to get the screw to actually line up with the threaded holes on all of our CIMs. Once we drilled them out to a larger diameter it worked fine, but perhaps this is an issue due to the holes being drilled before bending the sheet metal?

[Gregor]

We didn't use many AM parts this year, but we watched many teams running the stock kitbot beach themselves on the bump.

In prior years (2010 & 2012), there was been some kind of modification to allow for traversing, or at least not getting stuck on obstacles.

I believe this should be an important requirement for designing future kitbots.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

That was my guess, too, though if this is the case the fact that AndyMark doesn't seem to sell the output shaft separately on their website is a bit of a headscratcher.

You might be able to buy it if you call them up.

[InFlight]

On the Nanobox there is inadequate clearance between the upper mounting hole location and the installed CIM motor. The 10-24 cap head bolts heads pushed the CIM down making for a very loud or binding gearbox. We had to machine down the OD of the bolt heads on a lathe to make these gearboxes usable. We used four of these per robot for our Mecanum drive.

[ehochstein]

We had huge successes with AndyMark this year.

We ended up using 5, 6" Aluminum Dualie Omni wheels. They worked perfectly all season except for one point during practice where the bolts keeping the wheel together fell out. It was easily fixed with some thread locker.

We used the kit bot chassis this year and modified it to be an H-Drive. We found it incredibly simple to make this modification, we just ordered a third inner side plate and an additional Toughbox Mini. We created four gusset plates to hold the center plate on the robot and had the "H" of our drive installed by the end of week 2. Worked great all season too.

Our least favorite AndyMark product of the season was the Stackerbox Double. It worked really well once we fully assembled it for use but it was a little difficult to modify the gearbox to work with a CIM motor. Overall, we found the documentation for the gearbox to be somewhat lacking. Would be super helpful if there was a document outlining the method to drive this directly with a CIM motor!

I know the team loves AndyMark, we bought a few non-AndyMark products this year and only ran into issues. The students are really happy with the quality that AndyMark brings to the table.

[Ben Martin]

We ran a raw box this year with a custom output shaft--no complaints, worked through every competition. 2 CIMs through VP's were input into the transmission.

We stripped the worm and worm gear on our practice robot's gearbox at one point, but we believe we assembled that one wrong and we were lifting 8 totes with a >5 ft lever arm with a 6:1 reduction against the gearbox (stress testing). So, the load rating seems pretty accurate.

We would certainly use it again.

[Qbot2640]

We used tons of AndyMark stuff this year. My only complaint was the shaft adapter to take the gear-motor shaft (10mm?) to half inch to drive a chain sprocket. We broke two...usually in match, rendering our lift inoperative. It would be nice to have a steel version...or better yet - make all the gear-motors have 1/2 hex shafts.

EDIT: Thought of another thing...The recesses for screw heads on the plastic belt pulley halves are too tight to get any kind of socket tool around the head - and the screws get too tight to drive with a slotted screwdriver.

[Nuttyman54]

1983 used the LJ Bevel Boxes in our drivetrain this year. There were a few quality issues with the bearing bores not being straight/lined up across the box and with some flashing left in a few of the bevel gear teeth that we had to file out. We bought 9 (2 robots + spare), and only 8 were really usable. We put the 4 best on the comp bot and the others on the practice robot. There was a noticeable difference in robot speed and battery draw, but ultimately they ran fine all season on both robots.

I would love to see these with a 1/2" hex output, since 3/8" hex COTS parts don't have the same available selection as 1/2" hex does.

From what I recall, that was the only AndyMark product we used on our robot this year. We had plans to run modified supershifters and all kinds of fun things, but then Recycle Rush happened.

Originally Posted by Gregor

We didn't use many AM parts this year, but we watched many teams running the stock kitbot beach themselves on the bump.

In prior years (2010 & 2012), there was been some kind of modification to allow for traversing, or at least not getting stuck on obstacles.

I believe this should be an important requirement for designing future kitbots.

I don't have the timecode reference handy, but Kate Pilotte mentioned on the Kit of Parts episode of Behind the Lines that the scoring platforms weren't added until something like October 2014, with the kitbot design already finalized and in manufacturing, so not much AndyMark could do at that point. The GDC did their best to implement a platform design which was capable of being traversed by the kitbot, but ultimately some team modifications were needed to avoid all potential problems.