Team 47... Alchemists...

[Ellery]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

...almost nothing actually.

Many of you stopped by the pits in Atlanta to look at our Dewalt drill transmission and our modifications that allow us to drive the drill transmission with either a Chiaphua motor, Bosch drill motor, Fisher Price motor, Globe motor, or Keyang motor.

I told many of you that I was worried half to death that this transmission would end up being not as robust as I had hoped and then I would have 8 times as many problems. But in actual fact, we had almost zero problems with this transmissions. With 3 competitions on our "real" robot and hours and hours on our practice robot, I can't think of a single time we took a transmission off the robot because we had a problem with the motor or the transmission. I have never had as few problems with gearboxes and motors on a FIRST robot.

I am definitely going to be publishing a paper on these transmissions this summer. With some luck, we may even make contact with Dewalt in time to get some of these beauties in the kit next year.

They were awesome.

Joe J.

Joe, did you have any problems controlling the drives with this unit? As a typical planetary gear system the backlash is typically what most software guys complain about. Was the controllability of the drives at a high enough resolution? Adding encoders to this unit wouldn't seem to help it much becuase of that slop in the gear system.

Thanks Joe.

Ellery