I know that it is illegal this year and in years past. However, would it not be cool to be able to make our own motors? Think about it, mecanum wheels without drive shafts. Or a high torque motor for lifting. I know that the reason for using pre-manufactured motors, are for safety, leveling of the playing field, ect… But, there is already 170+ pages to the document, whats a couple more for motor requirements. What are your guys thoughts?
Chuckle… building motors is cool, but you want ANOTHER thing the build in six weeks? That’s hard core!
Jason
Ha 
yea thats me always adding things to build. But if you think about it, you would be trading the building of the driving chains, sprockets, shafts, for a motor inside a wheel.
off season project anyone?
How about building a gearbox inside the wheel? That would be cool.
Hmm… a planetary gearbox, inside a wheel. Now thats a concept!
Edit
Well, I was looking around teh interwebs and found these suckers; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_reluctance_motor , http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/5636349/Dyson-unveils-worlds-fastest-motor-in-new-vacuum.html Supposedly, they are much faster than any other motor out there. off season project?
Would it be cool? Yep. Would it be easy? No. In HS physics, one of the class projects was to build a motor. Of the half-dozen or so attempts, zero actually worked.
Or, this paraphrased discussion of a R/C airplane starter motor with another member of the Aero Design team I’m on:
Me: “Think I’ll try to get into that motor again and fix it.”
Operations Officer: “We think it was already on its way out.”
Me: “Yeah, but we found the problem, right? Shouldn’t be that hard to fix.”
OO: “We think that that’s just the final phase. We’re thinking that the contacts were making contact for a long time, which is why we thought we had all those battery issues. E.C.'s starter is better all around.” [E.C. is another member who has his own plane]
Me: “That makes sense.”
This was taking place a couple of days after I’d pulled the dud motor apart and found the issue–one magnet contact sprung. We thought we’d fixed it, then we put the whole thing back together.
I think the other reason not to have team-built motors is that it can be pretty darn hard. For some teams, it can be impossible. However, what I’d do is try to do it during the summer or fall as a team-building project, and then present it to your physics teacher as extra credit if it works.
Hmm… yea, i can see how that would be a hard task to accomplish. What do you guys think of a planetary gearbox, inside of a mecanum or omni wheel?
if you built a CNC style autowinding robot you could build a bunch.
I’m not sure that’s the best place for one, but it’s a good place to start. Start with a mecanum, as there’s more room “inside” one of those. You’ll want to have some way for a mounting to come outside (better for the motors that way), but that’s a pretty “easy” thing to do.
Oh, and I think this would be a good thing to do after your competitions…
If you do actually get this working, I understand that CD-Media is always looking for new whitepapers. This would be a great topic for one of those.
Cool, and thanks for the advice i wont put my fab people through the total redesign of our working chassis 