Rotation Systems

[Goaliexam]

Now that the season is over, I am curious to how everyone approached rotating their turrets (if you did).

What kind of hardware and motors did you use? What were its advantages/limitations? How much did it cost (money & weight)?

I'll start off: We were a bit unsuccessful (partly why I'm asking about other solutions) using a directly-mounted solution. We didn't pick up balls from the ground, so the entire turret was mounted on top of a rectangular board, which was in turn mounted on a lazy susan bolted on to a second board below. The window motor was then directly attached to the bottom board, and when it was turned, the whole assembly would rotate.

Only once it was assembled (doh!) we realized that it was impossible to have the wires come up through the center, so we had an umbilical cord of wires come up through a corner, leaving enough slack to rotate about 90 degrees off center in either direction. Suffice to say, with all those connections and the slight "play" in the motor, it wasn't a very stable rotation platform, and we ended up just bolting it down and turning the robot to aim.

So how about you all?