I was talking with mentors and other teams that questions our use of infinity belts, on our last two robots and why we don’t use gears. I know some team strictly believe that gears are the way and more consistent, but also the gears weigh more and sometimes just don’t work in a design. What does your team stand by?
Round polycord infinity belts just have a bad failure mode where if they slip, they tend to get hot and stick to itself and/or the pulley (if it’s plastic), which causes them to slip more, which then builds up more heat, etc, etc, until something inevitably fails. This usually means that a game piece is jammed in your robot, which in a game with a possession limit of 1, means you are now playing defense.
If they don’t slip, they tend to work fine.
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My team discussed using infinity belts this year. The last time we used them was in 2020, and it worked out fine. We used the exact polycord belts described in the above post. But generally, gears WILL be more reliable and accurate.
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It all depends on the application but we have used figure 8 belts many times with success and it is preferred for many uses like a conveyor system where the distance is defined by the game piece size which may not work so neatly with a geared system.
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Our team generally uses gears, but this year we are using an infinity belt because gears would not work. The infinity belt works fine, but I’ve noticed it adds tension and friction to the system that gears would not add.
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