Fisher Price Motor Into Drill Gearbox

[Travis Hoffman]

Originally Posted by David Bridge

That would be team 177... Not only did we press new gears onto the motors to allow them to interact with the planetary gears inside the bosch transmissions, but the original design also called for a worm wheel reduction to be used to move our arm (we actually did this to both motors and ran them together to get double the power) this effectively gave the motors a 70+x reduction which we thought would have been and awesome way to hang, folding the entire robot up without having to worry about backdrive or not having enough power... however we were having trouble getting a good mate between the worm wheel and gears and and the set up was so powerful that it kept tearing the wheels apart (they were brass) so we finally wound up eliminating the worm gear and just using the fisher prices through the drill transmission as our winch

Team 48 also used this method with great success on our lift mechanism. Two FP's mated to two drill transmissions were coupled to the second stage chain lift system on our arm. Those babies are what enabled our robot to hang so quickly and reliably all year. After the anti backdrive pins failed to keep the bot suspended in the air during the finals of the Buckeye Regional, we ultimately removed them from the drill trannies and added a servo actuated ratchet lock system to the lift to keep the robot hanging. The system was flawless after that.

I will ask the mechanical designers to explain their methods in a later post.