pic: What else has Billfred been doing?

[Billfred]

Man, I thought they didn't post these things until after I finished the description! (insert anime-style sweat drop here)

Yes, it is indeed a kiwi drive. I've been working on it as part of a research grant from Preston Residential College here at USC for the better part of the semester. (Preston offered grants up to $500 to research a topic with a faculty member. It was a good excuse to learn to CAD, among other things.)

The idea is to create a kiwi drive that a team with limited resources and fabrication abilities can create. The only thing that you'd have to add on top of the list of tools needed to fabricate the Kitbot is a power drill. A center punch and/or scribe wouldn't hurt either, but you can live without them. (You can get fancier with this design--if you could find an appropriate sprocket, you could substitute an AndyMark Gearbox for the third IFI transmission and possibly shave a few bucks off of the cost. But since I couldn't find the right sprocket for the job without having one custom-machined, I kept with three IFIs.)

Most of my time has been spent just learning the finer points of Pro/ENGINEER (what USC uses) and designing those corner brackets. (You can cut two from a Kitbot's top plate. You can't really use it for its intended purpose in this setup anyway, so you might as well get something from it, right?)

We're hoping to get this thing together for Discovery Day (USC's annual undergraduate research shin-dig) in a couple of weeks. It should be fun.

Originally Posted by Greg Needel

i hope you are going to have some ball casters or skids under the corners of the triangle or it might be unsteady.

Something will be going under there. I'm thinking PVC, since I already had to buy some to make spacers with.

Originally Posted by Stuart

I personaly would move the wheels to the corners instead

It could be done like that, but one of the first things I learned from my mentor (Dr. Philip Voglewede, if anyone was at the Palmetto team social) was that the wheels's axes needed to converge in the middle for things to work out smoothly. To get them in the corners would take, at least in my judgement, a lot more trouble than it's worth. (But if someone has an idea, I'm all ears.)