pic: Two-speed low profile gearbox + PTO

[Aaron Ng]

I think I see what you are talking about: those shafts that have the gear directly driven by the CIMs.

hmmm. This is gonna be kind of hard to describe without a cad model in front of both of us, but there is a spacer right in front of the 60t(?) dog gear. You can flip the placement of the larger and smaller dog gears, put a thin gear from sdp-si on the hex output where the spacer currently is, and have it be geared 1-1 to an encoder on the inside of the plate. That way it cant ever be destroyed, and it will always be 1-1 with the output, since it is driven by the output shaft.

But that would require a lot of repositioning of gears, as well as requiring a small gearbox plate dedicated to mounting an encoder. Perhaps too much work for something that can be mounted elsewhere with relative ease?

just my two cents.

also, is that a versahub that is on the dog gear for the PTO? the part says vex, but searching up the ID gives a gearbox