pic: FRC488 Chassis Coming Together

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Richard

Live axles and chain-in-the-frame? Simple concepts and slick execution are the hallmarks of great engineering.

And painstaking attention to detail is how the great ones make it look easy.

The chain will run along the inside of the frame rather than in the tubing to make accessibility somewhat less of a nightmare.

This is the first time I've designed a robot with live axles in years and it's not a bad way to go if you're able to achieve a final ratio in a gearbox rather than by using chain as a final gearing stage. The hubs on large, keyed COTS sprockets are an enormous weight penalty otherwise and the main reason why I switched to dead axles in the first place.

I hope that we keep on track with simplicity this season and the rest of our mechanisms turn out to be as simple to build and operate as this drivetrain has been so far.

I also hope that our plasma cutter stops eating pieces of aluminum for breakfast, lunch and dinner. There's nothing quite like making the same part 8 times because the plasma cutter keeps finding new, interesting ways of cutting holes in the wrong places.