Whats your opinon of 173

[Jason Haaga]

Originally posted by DougHogg
I came over to check out your robot after the whole event. I liked your gear shift mechanism, particularly the use of latex tube as a tensioning device in your shifters.

We had a gear shift also, but we changed gears on both motors with one servo. Even though I did see your mechanism at the event, I would love to see a picture of your gear shifter as I don't remember the details.

We are rookies and pretty much stayed in low gear. In high gear, we tended to blow fuses if we turned suddenly. Also we had had some gear grinding on a few occasions so we were a bit nervous about shifting. Did you have any such problems? If not, what was the solution?

One other question: Did your driver use one joystick or two for steering?

Our shifter's pretty simple (I'll try to find a pic for you). Uses two servos to shift the drill motors (one tended to be a little unreliable). The gear grinding is from not shifting into gear fully. What we did to correct this was place limit switches on the shifting hoop to detect when the motors were actually in gear or not. Until the shift was completed, the program ignored any input from the driver and pulsed the motors lightly until it clicked into gear (significantly reduced wear and tear on the robot's drive train). In high gear, we could not turn from a dead stop well (or at all mostly), the motors just stalled out even trying to turn, but we had no problems with fuses. As for steering, we used one joystick with a modified tank drive routine to get more manueverability than the default code.