How long did it take for you to build your drivetrain?

[Macdaddy549]

We use the same drive train as past years. I hope it will be the same this year. If you have something that works use it. You don't have time at this point to re-invent the wheel.

[rmmlg]

Last year, we spent most of the 6 weeks designing the drive train. This didn't work out so well since we didn't have any working special features. Granted, we had a very good drive train, but special features are nice to have. Things we have decided to do differently this year:
-we've done more brainstorming during the off-season
-we plan on doing the brainstorming differently and decide on a drive train and design it during the first week, so that it can be built with time to spare in testing and practicing driving for the last week of the build season
-we weren't organized enough for brainstorming last year and didn't meet oftne enough during the first week

So that's what we plan to do differently to hopefully spend less time on a drive train and more time on special features.

[Bill Gold]

Here has been my history with drivetrains in FIRST…

In 2000, as a junior on Team #258, we completed our drivetrain in three weeks. It was a simple 4wd chain and belt driven system run by the ole 3/8” drill motors. The reason it wasn’t completed earlier was because we had very few members of the team, and were working simultaneously on the ball mechanism and drivetrain.

In 2001, as a senior on Team #258, we built pretty much the same 4wd drivetrain as 2000 (but completely with chain and sprockets) in 2 weeks.

In 2002, as a college student on Team #258, we built a 2-speed shift on the fly sprocketbox drivetrain powered by just the CIM motors in 3 weeks, and then spent another week lightening it up significantly.

In 2003, as a college student on Team #258, we spent the first week and a half designing our swerve drive system powered by both 1/2” drill motors and the CIM motors (and rotated by the Globe motors), and then we didn’t complete it until about a week before ship date. We took our time on it because, since it was a simple game, we didn’t really have any other mechanism on the robot. We ghetto-rigged some wings on Thursday of SVR. If we had really tried we could have had the swerve designed in half a week, and then had it completed somewhere along the third week.

In 2004, as a college student on Team #258, we spent about a week and a half designing our “stretcher-drive” system powered by the 1/2” drill motors, and finished it about a week from shipdate. We would have finished it earlier had we had more than 3 people machining parts along with parts we outsourced to a machine shop. There was a crapton of machining on that robot for a team of just a handful of us. It was a lot of fun to work on, though, looking back on it.