paper: FRC1189 2009 Shooter Gearbox Development

[AdamHeard]

Was the ability to aim left/right ever used? How effective was varying the speeds?

[kramarczyk]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Was the ability to aim left/right ever used? How effective was varying the speeds?

Yes, it was used when pinning someone at the trailer hitch. The varying speeds did work with the camera, but the game ended up play faster that we thought and as a system (camera through to hardware) it wasn't fast enough to automatically track. Fortunately there are manual options for left,center, right at a contact distance (~3 ft). Did it work as well as I would have liked, no. Did it work, yes. As the balls broke, down the variation in game pieces caused problems.

http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/match/2009gl_qm76
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH8KL... F6C2B&index=0

[JVN]

Great paper!
A must read for anyone wanting to learn more about utilizing FP motors.

[jonboy]

Great paper and thank you for your effort to pass useful info along. I would bet there will be some FP motors and gear boxes in this year's KOP.

One comment: As I recall the FP motor air intake is on the front face and the exhaust is at the rear where you can see the fan blades. Would it add to reliability and longevity to add some openings in the gear box to allow air intake to keep the armature a little colder? Cooler armature would result in cooler winding lowering the resistance with resulting possible increase in output power.

Keep up the good work. ... jon

[Jared Russell]

Has anyone ever machined a heat sink to fit over the FP motors' body? I would think that if you can get a snug metal-metal (or metal-thermal paste-metal) fit, you could probably cool the motor quite effectively by increasing the volume/surface area of heat dissipation and decreasing the effective power density.

[Aren_Hill]

In 2008 we used part of a quadcore cpu heatsink that was round, and simply spread it wide enough to fit over the fp motor, worked quite well.

you can see it in the lower left of this pic

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/31538

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Jared341

Has anyone ever machined a heat sink to fit over the FP motors' body? I would think that if you can get a snug metal-metal (or metal-thermal paste-metal) fit, you could probably cool the motor quite effectively by increasing the volume/surface area of heat dissipation and decreasing the effective power density.

I've heard this heat sink worked wonders on 1024's 2008 robot.