Due to an oversight an intentional, well thought out design choice, my team’s robot this year looks like a horse. Specifically, the shooter looks like a horse’s head.
It’s already assembled, so the rest of the horse’s body would be hard to design in and add, but I figured the least I could do was give the poor guy some eyes, so he can see.
However, this has lead to a problem. Where the horses eyes should be is right on the wheel shaft. I don’t want to put the googly eyes somewhere they shouldn’t be, or our horse wouldn’t be able to see.
Does anyone know the highest rpm you can safely spin various googly eyes at? Is there anyone that sells high rpm googly eyes? If not, does anyone have tips on how to make our own high rpm googly eyes?
I think most COTS googly eyes should be able to hold up, the black dot inside isn’t very heavy and the plastic tends to be relatively strong. If you don’t want to stick the eyes directly on the shaft, you could look into having a cover made to support the eyes on. (thinking a few standoffs around the shaft and a sheet metal/polycarb platform for mounting the googly eye or a 3D printed cover)
We had Bruce the Shark with massive 6 inch googly eyes on our practice bot’s cargo manipulator, can we spun them at about 2 rpm when we deployed our mech.
could you drill a shaft clearance hole through the googly eye allowing the eye to be mounted to the frame and the shaft to spin freely. You would have to have large enough eyes that they would still be able to google-I assume that is the verb describing the bouncing and rolling of the pupil
If the googly eyes are placed so they are centered on the ends of the shaft, they’ll be fine…it’s only when they are off center a ways, that they’ll get that funny look.
A CIM has a free speed of about 5000 RPM iirc - I would recommend testing on that or a similar motor before mounting it to the actual robot.
Please film your tests because it would be beneficial for other teams in similar situations I more videos of googly eyes spinning at 6000 rpm in my life.
Our shooter is looking somewhat horse-adjacent this year too, but our intake last year was incredibly horse-like. Specifically a horse in battle armor. Do other team’s designs tend to look equestrian too?
In theory, it’s impossible to balance a googly eye on a shaft. As soon as you spin it, the pupil will fling off to one side. If you try to offset the eye to counterbalance the pupil, then the pupil will move to the “further off-axis” side of the sclera. It’s not enough to cause practical problems, but it’ll never be perfect.
