paper: Cyber Blue 234 Belt vs Chain Technical Evaluation

[MrForbes]

We made a change between Arizona and Atlanta that made us go about 30% faster....we bought some sprockets from Small Parts Inc for under $10 each, and brought a short piece of #35 chain and a couple extra master links with us. I hate to think of what it would have taken to make this change if we had used a toothed belt drive.

If the robot is right at the edge of optimum performance (not the case this year), then the efficiency is important. Most years it does make some difference, but careful drive ratio selection might be more important. The wide availability of different tooth count #35 sprockets, and the ease of changing the chain length, seem to me to be a much bigger advantage, especially for teams like ours that don't have enough experience to get it right the first time.

My point is that there seem to be a lot of considerations that you left out, which may not be important to your team, but make a big difference to many other teams.

Still, it's great that you did the research, and showed us that there is advantage to be gained by careful experimentation. It would be neat to see more belts on robots next year. The experiments with smaller chain and belts will also be very helpful, and if more teams see the benefits, they will increase demand for the parts, and hopefully it will become even easier to make these changes.