Team 4096 Grasshopper Drive design

[msigalov]

Originally Posted by Abhishek R

I recommend you check out this document. 624 actually tried to make a simpler version of nonadrive/butterfly a few years back, and we dubbed the result the "Grasshopper" drive.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2968?

The experiment was pretty successful, achieving all the strengths of the standard nonadrive setup while being relatively simple and light.

On the idea of the static strafe wheel - we ran that setup in the original iteration. It worked generally fine most of the season, but every now and then we would find a rough spot in the field where we couldn't strafe. In the offseason, when we made it actuate up and down pneumatically, we realized the static version had actually been causing a lot of friction in the drive. As soon as it was lifted up off the ground, we saw significant speed/acceleration improvements and increased battery life. Someone at one of our offseason events even asked if we added another CIM to our drive!

Your drivetrain was the inspiration for our design, hence the most likely incorrect grasshopper name. We wanted to avoid tensioning, but we will try to figure out how to vertically actuate the strafe wheel. Would it need to be actuated when we are strafing, or whenever it is in h drive?