pic: Average Winch Innards

[Jean Tenca]

Very cool. I'm curious, is there anything special with the wiring for this? How do you accommodate the motor rotating so many times? I've seen a few robots do motors in rollers in the past, but I've always been unsure as to how exactly they wire them.

[Ari423]

Originally Posted by Jean Tenca

Very cool. I'm curious, is there anything special with the wiring for this? How do you accommodate the motor rotating so many times? I've seen a few robots do motors in rollers in the past, but I've always been unsure as to how exactly they wire them.

Richard can correct me if I'm wrong, but from Mike's picture it looks like the CIM is mounted and the spool rotates around the CIM. Not shown in the original picture is a large gear that fits on the end of the VP and bolts to the side of the spool and spins it. If this is right, then there is no need to worry about the CIM wires rotating.

[NoshBrooks]

The Winch functioned as you all have guessed, although, we did end up using a half inch ratcheting wrench to prevent the system from reversing after endgame.

In all honesty we don't have the best climber, it was fairly slow and usually made more sense to just score 2 balls and take the tower. Nice to have it working though. We saw some other teams like 4967 do something similar to our method, not sure how well it worked, never got to see it in a match!

It was mounted on 2 brackets riveted to the belly-pan.

[NoshBrooks]

[quote=NoshBrooks;1616372]The Winch functioned as you all have guessed, although, we did end up using a half inch ratcheting wrench to prevent the system from reversing after endgame.

In all honesty we don't have the best climber, it was fairly slow and usually made more sense to just score 2 balls and take the tower. Nice to have it working though. We saw some other teams like 4967 do something similar to our method, not sure how well it worked, never got to see it in a match!

It was mounted on 2 brackets riveted to the belly-pan. The sheath spun around the sim and the sim was hard mounted to the frame.

[JesseK]

o.O

The pictures of the full assembly are the closest to "magic" I have seen in FRC in a long time. Very cool design.

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by JesseK

o.O

The pictures of the full assembly are the closest to "magic" I have seen in FRC in a long time. Very cool design.

Thank you, and thanks to all who joined this discussion.

I apologize for my cryptic description. Had meant to add a picture or sketch of the complete assembly, but I have been traveling on business this week and don't have access to team drawings from here.

The comment that this winch design is not very weight-efficient is correct; the observation that low bar robots like ours typically had weight to spare this year also applies to 3620. This winch worked for us because it fit in the space we had available, and put the weight where it helped us. We also thought it was cool to hide the CIM inside the drum and use its body as a spindle. As Noah said, our climber was not very fast. It helped in a few situations, but often we were more productive shooting in the final seconds. However, you cannot beat scaling for wow factor. Our triple at IRI with HOT and HYPE will live in my memory forever.