Fisher Price Motor Replacement Gearbox

[Joe Johnson]

Disclaimer: My company, Robotic Amusements, Inc., uses them as a source for motor/gearboxes for our robots, but other than than, I have no financial ties to Banebots, Inc. what so ever.

I just visited the Banebots website and saw the have a lot of great new products.

Old timers will recall that last year, I advocated that teams use Banebot's 36mm planetary gearbox with their Fisher Price motors. While the 36mm gearbox was much better than the plastic transmission that Fisher Price donated to the kit, to be honest, it was not as robust as I would have liked for some of the more demanding FIRST applications*.

Now I see that Banebot has a 42mm gearbox that would be a great step up in performance from the 36mm gearbox. Note that these gearboxes are shipped with an RS-550 motor (the FP motors are 550 series motors == about twice the power as a 540 series motor) but that they are designed to be used with the RS-775 motors (which are effectively drill motors => very high power motors > 300W).

While I have not held one of these jewels in my hands, I can tell you that if I were still on the ChiefDelphi team, I'd be ordering a few of these beauties right now just to find out where we could use them and to make sure we had them in case the Banebot warehouse runs short...

...I am just saying...

Joe J.

*Note: it takes about 15 minutes from start to finish to take a FP motor and get it running in either the 42mm or the 36mm gearbox from Banebots. From my point of view, it is easier and less costly to use one of these gearboxes than it is to design and build a method to mount the plastic Fisher Price gearbox and get a torque out the business end. The mount so easy and they have long juicy shafts that are easy to support if needed and make getting torque out of them is a dreams plus you get the ability to easily change ratios if you screw up a calculation (or guess wrong about the game). For $40/$60 bucks for the 36mm/42mm gearboxes, it is hard to beat.