pic: Four Speed Three CIM Gearbox

[hectorcastillo]

Originally Posted by TJP123

503 found them quite useful, so much so that we had two separate PTOs. 4 CIMs to power our can grabbers and 2 for the elevator. The drivetrain could use 2, 4, or all 6 CIMS.

That's very interesting. I've only thought of PTOs as using all of the motors at once for one function or another. It hadn't yet crossed my mind that you could be running multiple functions simultaneously by splitting up the motors like that and being able to control these functions independently.

Although what advantages would it serve to have power coming from the same place if you could just use more motors for a different mechanism? The only reason I can think of is because there is a limit on the amount of CIMs you can use and it's hard to get that kind of power from other motors, so for climbing or stacking you'd want to be able to tap into those motors. But for example there wouldn't be much of an advantage from using a PTO to also power an intake system that could easily be powered by a smaller motor. It would actually be kind of wasteful.