transmission

[Anthony]

Last year, we ran a 4 wheel drive robot, with both Bosch and both Chip. motors pulling. We ran one of each motor to each side of our robot (one Bosch and one Chip pulled the right side and the same for the left). We incorporated our high to low gear shifting mechanism after the chip. had been geared down to match the RPM of the Bosch. So we had our shifting mechanism as close to the motors as was possible. For our high gear, we simply ran this to a chain drive system which ran at about 5.5 f/s. In low gear, we further geared our motors down so that we had far more power (something we found to be very important especially in competition for KotH) and ran at about 2.2 f/s. Our problem however was that we did not want to risk stripping our motors or our transmissions out, so we did not have shift on the go. This was mainly due to the fact that we already had really high torque at the closest location to our motors where there was a common RPM. Fortunately in the KotH we found ourselves to be incredible useful in that we could push any team off the top of the ramp (except team 34 which had a 2'x3' brake, props to their design team).

Even so, I find that the shifting mechanism as early as possible was incredibly effective although we have not really had all that much experience since this is our third year. I will post a picture of the transmission as soon as I can so that maybe somebody can offer us a way to make it a shift on the go.

Has anybody found a way to get more than 2 gears with one shifting mechanism? Does everybody use the 1" pneumatic piston for shifting?