Team 95 2017 Build Thread

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

James, I might not be working with a team this year, but to echo earlier sentiments this thread is always a highlight. It's been very interesting to see you and your team evolve in design. I'm just sad I've never gotten a chance to see one of your robots in person!

Thanks!

Originally Posted by apm4242

This is our first year using vex planetary gearboxes. I see you have mounted one directly to your intake shaft. We never thought to do this. How do they hold up to being mounted like this? Does repeated shaft deflection put undo stress on the gearbox? Any weird loading issues?

We've used this sort of setup before, but we make sure that the coupling of the output shaft is rigidly coupled to the cross shaft so the transmission output shaft isn't cantilevered.

In general we've found that the VP gearboxes are quite robust if a bit of care is taken in their mounting and assembly. This might mean NOT mounting them super-rigidly to prevent slight mis-alignments from putting a lot of load on the bearing package.

Originally Posted by D_Price

I am with you on this one. Myself and other mentor for the team help out with the design of the robot in Inventor due to the fact that our school hardly teaches 3D modeling to a degree in which the student can have the design done before the robot can be built. Normally after the season we have students design any of Off-season robot that is thought of.

Originally Posted by JacobD

Makes a lot of sense to me. I taught myself Solidworks for an off-season project which definitely made it easier going into the build season. But, still there are a lot of different things that you need to understand from an engineering perspective that cannot be easily taught to a student who is also balancing a heavy school work load.

We do teach CAD in the offseason so that our kids are familiar with how it operates and what problems it can be used to solve. However, we've found it to be remarkably more fun and productive for the students to make prototype and mock-up subsystems while I turn their discoveries into something manufacturable.

We also use CAD heavily. Cardboard Aided Design. Which is considerably more accessible and intuitive to most students than the other CAD. It plays into our sheet-metal-heavy design repertoire nicely.