My thoughts exactly. It’s a pretty good book, and arguably the best value on there. I wouldn’t mind having a class set.
One of these days I’ll come up with some sort of 3D print project for Non-FRC students to design around these.
Some surprising absences, but some good options too:
- The zombie Talon SRs are showing their age in Juan’s testing, but they’re priced about right at 50 credits and durable as heck. (Related: No matter what you think of Digilent’s choices with the DMC 60, 100 credits is highway robbery.)
- Wago Lever-Nuts are the awesomest way to connect wires without tools. I’ve drug parts of my Fight Night robot around by the wires, and they never blinked. The 10 AWG option is a welcome addition to the toolbox.
- You’re nuts not to go for a couple of the ebm papst fans, given the historical rules about fans.
- The Loctite adhesives are nicely priced compared to retail.
- The new Armabot F1 intake looks like it has some interesting tuning capabilities. For ten credits with the surgical tubing included, it’s worth evaluating.
- The BaneBots 550 motor is replacing the old AndyMark 9015 just about everywhere. A little more power than the 9015, still dirt cheap. Nice if a 775-class motor is too big or too heavy.
- EVO/DeCIMate pinions for the RedLine are nice if you’ve bought into either.
- The AndyMark thermal stickers are genuinely helpful things, and at 5 credits they’re very well-priced.
- Cosigned on the Fluke multimeters, they’re nice.
- You know whether you need the CTRE control system parts, pneumatics parts, a NavX, or shaft collars in your team’s colors. None are priced at shockingly good or bad figures.
Coming soon. We’ll share this before the end of the year so teams can 3D print it. This adapter plate let’s you mount to a versaplanetary and has slots to bend the motor leads out & attach an electrical connector. Shown is rev 1 but rev 2 will include a few improvements before we share it.
We used throttle motors on our 2018 robot and they worked. Figured we should find a way to let all the teams use them if they want to.
This is clearly further than even I am willing to go for a meme. I doff my cap to you.
NavX, Solenoids, Clippard tanks, Armabot intake kits. Maybe blue 1/2" hex shaft collars. That’s all for now, the selection for round 1 is anemic. I hope that we have something good to spend the credits on in round 2.
Wow, I dont think I’ve seen any other team except 323 use that stuff. Cool that you folks made good use of it.
Not to derail the thread, but what’s the benefit of this over using a natively supported BB550 from FirstChoice for 10 credits (or AM for $9). The BB550 has 4.5x more power, weighs about the same, and doesn’t need a special 3D printed adapter.
I’ve looked through all the threads I can find about throttle motors, and the only use case where the reason the team used it wasn’t “because we can”, “for the meme”, or “because of the [now non-existent] motor limit” was 1640 using it as a tachometer in 2013. It’s cool, but is it really useful?
Not all applications need the power of a 550. Throttles are also lower rpm, draw a miniscule amount of current and you can run 2 off one motor controller per 2018 rules. We used them on our carriage intake last season, stalled them often and they held up.
But mainly the answer for us was because we have a million of them. We’ve received 4 a year in the KOP for forever and so has every other team with no way to really use them easily. I’d estimate there are probably 100,000+ of these out in the wild sitting in drawers. At least this makes it an option to use - probably for a turret or some low power, low rpm application.
Scenarios where I could see this being less of a meme:
- International teams that will likely get another half-dozen this year, but have to pay exorbitant shipping on any “good” motors in some cases. (Fewer cases than there used to be, but it ain’t zero.)
- Broke teams that could get a VP or VP Lite bought, but the extra $20-30 for a 775pro or BAG (or a RedLine, shipped) starts to rack up
- High-stall applications when you don’t have the software sophistication to nerf yourself. One, they are reportedly pretty hard to kill. Two, if you do manage to kill one…yeah, spares are out there.
- Low-current applications; they’re 7A stall. As much as we make our main breakers scream for mercy these days, some teams might like that.
- Non-FRC applications! When the drama club asks for something to move in their next production or you want to put something on the homecoming float, you probably don’t care about superior performance but do care about slapping something together quickly. 1/2" hex gets things slapped together quickly.
Has anyone here used the AMT103’s before? Are they any good, maybe for drivetrain applications? What’s up with all the colored plastic pieces?
I haven’t used those before, but the colored pieces are for different shaft sizes.
We’ve used them. They’re pretty good for most applications, especially if you don’t use Talon SRXes (and SPARK MAXes now) since they just use standard sized headers, so you can plug them right into the RIO without any special cables or breakouts. They’re also really durable and hold up to the stress of competition nicely.
What applications do you guys use the lever nuts for? We’ve always used powerpoles for our motor wires. CAN bus connections maybe?
They can be used for CAN. We used them as a quick splice when our pcm power wires got torn in a match and we didn’t have time to do a full replacement.
How about wiring an entire robot?
Granted, it was AndyMark Fight Night, their annual cardboard fighting robot tournament. But those two 5-pole lever nuts have been on all three iterations of the Pun-Slinger as my entire power distribution setup:
Motor 1 V+
Motor 2 V+
V+ in
UBEC* V+
Motor 3 V+
(and then the other lever nut is the same but V-)
*I’m using a Cheap and Dirty radio on this, and my Talon SR lacks a battery eliminator circuit to power the receiver through the PWM cable. (No FRC-legal one that I know of has that.) The UBEC is a cheap and small voltage converter to give me the 5-6V for that.
In two of the three years, I took robot-wrecking damage from the eventual champions. But in the meantime, I’d still be driving around, dragging along motors or whatever by the wires trying to stay alive. In no instance has a lever nut lost a wire connection, even when Nick Lawrence ripped both of my drive wheels and gearboxes off of the (cardboard) frame. If they can survive that (oh, and I was running 9015s and NeveRests at 18V with no fuses or breakers installed because I’d rather go down in flame than lose for something tripping), I am confident using them in FRC applications for appropriately-sized wire.
Connecting attached-lead ESCs to motor wire would be a valid use for the bigger ones in my book (in that it’s rated the same as 10 AWG wire), as would CAN bus connections (one 2-pole connector for green, one for yellow) on the smaller-gauge lever nuts sold at AndyMark.
For teams without the tools for Powerpoles or the skills for XT-60s, they can be a nice and easy way to splice wires together for just about any purpose.
This^^^
They are great for CAN. Especially moving things around and troubleshooting.
So, you would need two of them per connection, right? One for yellow and one for green? Just double checking that there’s not ones where they’re split somehow.
Correct. Everything on a given lever nut is connected together, at least for lever nuts found at AndyMark or FIRST Choice.
we 3d print mounts for our lever nuts https://twitter.com/WAGOCorporation/status/971772344254500866