FRC971 Spartan Robotics 2016 Release Video

[AustinSchuh]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Also, I'm curious...what is the Encoder Shielding Chassis Ground Assembly for?

In 2014, we had a lot of trouble with EMI and cross-talk on the robot. Since then, we've spent a lot of time and energy worrying about EMI. We run a 6 pin shielded cable for our encoder and pot combo (ground, power, index pin, A, B, and pot value). To properly terminate the shield, you need to ground it to your frame in such a way that the EMI actually makes it to the frame. That assembly does that.

We had a number of pinched wires this year, so we'll be looking at revisiting that design. You'll see something like that on our robot next year though.

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Finally, what went into the design decisions of making your own gearboxes versus using something like the VersaPlanetary on some subsystems (like your intake)?

Aren keeps trying to get us to run VP's in places.

We've designed enough custom gearboxes that they aren't risky, and we can generally get exactly what we want when we design our own.

For the intake, we've gotten really good at timing belt reductions, and the single reduction from there would have been required anyways since we needed to power the gearbox from the middle of the shaft anyways. The VP wouldn't have actually made it much simpler.

For the arm (intake up/down, shooter angle, and shoulder angle), we wanted to control the backlash. The backlash at the end of the arm is about 1/16th of an inch, which is phenomenal.

We were actually really trying to use a VP for our climber, but we couldn't get the packaging to work

We've been running timing belt reductions as the first stage since 2013, and have really liked it. They are much quieter, and we don't see wear.