We (FRC 4466) found a use for the Denso throttle motors so we designed and printed a gearbox for them for our application.
Edit: I don’t know why the thumbnail images are upside down, but they are right side up when you click them.
Looking good!
Is this something you’d be willing to open up to the community, through Thingiverse or other methods?
Thanks,
Initial testing shows it works very well.
Our plan is to share it, but we have a lot more work to do before we can get to that. Week 3 is almost over and we just finally started building our design.
We are a team of 3 students and 3 mentors so we can’t spare much extra time right now.
Anyone that is interested can pm me their email address and we can send you the files.
Good luck to everyone this season.
Just wondering what you’re using this for (if you’re willing to share). I was looking into using something similar earlier in the season, but I found that for much less effort you can just use an automotive or snowblower motor (or even a neverest) and get the same power. What made you choose the throttle motor and custom gearbox?
Nice work! It looks like you folks are really utilizing 3D printing and enjoy the challenge.
Does anyone have the spec on the gear on these motors, to source or print a mating gear?
Yep, it has a 12 tooth, 0.75 module, 20 degree pressure angle gear/pinion
There is a good online component database called HPC part community that can be used to find a gear with the correct tooth-profile and any number of teeth. You can then edit the .stp and put a 1/2" hex bore in.
This is correct. Autodesk Inventor has a great tool for creating spur gear models that can be 3d printed to match this motor’s pinion gear.
We are building a short low boiler bot. This is the drive motor/gearbox for an active component of our dumper. We looked at other options too but this motor actually fit the need perfectly for several reasons:
- It has the highest RPM of the lower power motors.
- It has the lowest power requirements (less taxing on our battery)
- It fit the space requirements. (The gearbox is also a structural element as it holds part of our framework for our dumper) The motors are literally about 1/4" inside the frame perimeter.
- This design keeps our wiring safer from being snagged by other bots.
- We have a stockpile of them from previous years (don’t we all lol)
There are other reasons too, we are a very low resource team (we are a family run team of only a few students) and our budget to build the bot this year, not counting the TE grant we got for reg/kop, is in the less than $500 range (mostly out of my own pocket, btw: donations gratefully accepted). So we are having to come up with creative ways to use our stockpile of leftovers from the previous 4 seasons.
Plus it was an excellent opportunity to teach some basic gearbox design.
And the best reason of all… WHY NOT. LOL
We got one of the MakerGear M2’s back in 2014 (our second year) and we absolutely love it. That year we printed many structural elements that managed to save us about 10-15 pounds on the structure of the bot (more room from manipulators).
We have been printing structural/sensor mounts ever since 2014. Last year we got the upgraded hot-end for the printer which allowed us to experiment with additional materials. In addition to ABS (our former favorite) and PLA (too brittle for structural components) we now can print PET-G and NYLON as well as several other materials. We haven’t tried NYLON yet (our 2013 rookie bot had one 3d-printed part, thanks to a first choice coupon, that was made of nylon, but someone else printed it) but we have used the PET-G filament. Last year we used PET-G to create translucent lenses for our bot’s lighting. This year we are using the PET-G for active mechanisms such as the gearbox in the images I posted.
Fortunately we have a huge stockpile of 3d printer filament from previous years. LOL
FDM, FFF, and other additive manufacturing has a HUGE place in FRC. The cost of entry is relatively low when compared to the utility of the tooling.
Wow, that’s a tight budget for a FIRST team! I have access to a lab full of Stratsys UPrints, so if there’s anything I can do to help you guys out, don’t hesitate to PM me.
Gearbox design is fun. Gearbox design coupled with FDM? That’s the intersection of fun and difficulty. It’s also a perfect opportunity to showcase how good of a calibration one has.
Ah, I assumed it was a 32 DP gear. That explains the slight backlash in our printed gearbox. For such low load motors it probably isn’t really an issue.
Thanks for the offer, we may need to take you up on that. 
BTW: What materials can you print? And do you have a link to the printers you use so I can look into them better?
Thanks
I’m quite curious as to why people seem to be wanting to use the throttle motors lately, i may have misread their spec sheet but they seem to be really under powered compared to something like a 395 or a 550. Are you just using them for the lighter weight or is there another reason?
There are a few main reasons, first up availability( everyone has access to heaps at no cost).
Ease of use, it has a decent pinion preinstalled so if you have a 3D printer it is pretty easy to make a gearbox with any reduction for it( obviously as reduction increases likelihood of 3D printed gear failure increases).
Durability, compared to a 395( which isn’t legal anymore) or a 550, while not as powerful they are effectively impossible to kill( no need for current limiting or underrunning compared with fan cooled).
It might not be very powerful, but lots of teams use AM PG’s and 2 of the throttle motors together on one controller is the same power as the rs775-125.
Alright thanks.
They also spin slower than a 395 or 550 at just 5000 rpm, so you need less reduction than you would with those motors. I really like the low stall current as well.
Some things on the robot need to move but don’t require a lot of power (like a turret). It’s a neat little motor for that.
Agreed. I honestly think that the biggest barrier to their use is the lack of resources available to them. At this point every established team has a ton of them, I would love to see them enter a niche for lower resource teams.
Someday I may round up these motors and make a non-FIRST engineering class project with them