Alpha dogs 4946 chassis design preview:
Still a lot of work to do. Its a west coast chassis design with 2-cim, 2-speed gearbox under the hood. We have a general idea of where the design is going, we are currently adding bearings, shafts and electronics.
Tried to keep this brief and to the point.
Good luck this season, see you on Einstein.
Alpha Dogs 4946
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6KG6N5Oa5mQcDhVTk5fMHpnWW8
Looks solid! A couple thoughts: It looks like you have a lot of extra space to move the outer wheels further apart. This will improve stability. Also, I’m curious what’s inside the big box? Is that a fancy battery holder?
Could you post a STEP file for those of us not using Inventor?
If that is your battery box, will it be easily accessible once the upper structure is installed?
The big box is a battery holder. We have had problems in the past with battery mounting. It is a little excessive and big, it probably will be redesigned.
Also regarding the accessibility. Depending on the game obviously, it may not be accessible. This is just a starting design and a million things will change before kickoff I guarantee
More of the battery box
Moving the wheels sounds like a good idea to consider, we’ll look into it, thanks! I believe it’s currently designed like this so that it would fit a 6" wheel if we decide to go that route, I guess once we finalize what wheel we’ll use we can figure that out. Also, as Ryan said the big box is a battery holder, but it’s likely not the final design, just a starting point. We’re considering changing the top plate to just a strip, maybe forgoing the metal altogether in favor of velcro like we did last year, we’re not sure yet. This is just a one of a couple prelim designs we have.
We placed the battery box there just for now with the intent of keeping the CG centered, but we’re fairly sure we’re going to need to move it to keep it accessible once we know what manipulators and mechanisms we’re going to need on the robot. This is again just a starting point, there’s a very good chance we’re going to be moving it closer to the edge of the robot to make it accessible. Thanks!
If you keep the battery box in it’s current orientation (battery on it’s side), a Velcro strap stuck to one of the sides may be all you need to retain the battery.
If you want to check out an interactive 3D model of of the chassis check the link out below. Strongly recommend this this rendering tool.
If you like automatic online 3D rendering, check out GrabCAD. It does version control, syncing across computers, and automatic 3D renderings on all 3D files. Plus it acts as cloud storage for any file type. The whole kit and caboodle. Cannot recommend highly enough.
Btw I also like the robot.
I agree GrabCAD is easily one of the best tools for this. The main reason I like SketchFab is the viewer can easily be embedded into a website or application to be viewed on mobile, desktop or VR and is generally great for media purposes. Also it can do mechanical animations.
Can vouch for SketchFab, it’s very easy to upload individual CAD files and have them embeddable in websites for desktop or mobile. Also you can edit the appearance (color, transparency, reflectivity, etc) of different components of your CAD model from the viewer if certain elements did not import exactly as you like them.