Should we be using chain or belts for our shooter? We have been using chain and have run into LOTS of problems.
What were the problems that you ran into using chain?
A picture may help us diagnose your problem as well - do you happen to have any images?
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it keeps wobbling, and master link are a pain.
Just in general, which one is used more often for shooting
We are using HTD5 belt on our shooter. Ran it up to full speed on our prototype with 2 NEOs with a 36:18 overdrive and it was fine.
WCP has as great series on designing with belts, the first video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltTnJ4J2uQI
Technobots also has a great calculator for figuring out what your timing pulley center-to-center spacing should be. My team has used this extensively this year (originally we were looking at using timing belts for powercell motion). https://www.technobotsonline.com/timing-pulley-distance-between-centres-calculator.html
What sort of belt should you use? For this application, a HTD5 15mm will most likely work best. Select the “drawing” tab at the bottom of this page and you can find what the “Pitch Length” of the belt is (the WCP video does a great job of explaining this) and finally you can find some great pulleys on this page. From there, plug in the three numbers you’ve collected into the technobots calculator and you’ll know the center-to-center spacing you need for your pulleys.
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Most of the time, people use gears with one reduction or belts with one reduction. You’re probably just running into loose chain flopping while the motor is going. Is that correct?
Another thing, you said there are a lot of problems, yet you elaborate on none of them in the original post. That’s how you get no help because the Chief Delphi regulars won’t really know what’s wrong. Please explain your issues with a fair amount of detail and remember pictures and videos are worth many, many words.
Good luck, Have fun, Build robots.
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If we can package it, we like to go direct drive (through appropriate gearbox). We have gone belt rather than chain for all mechanism for the life of this team.
This year has belt on drive train, intake and indexer, direct drive on shooter.
If you run a chain make sure you have a tensioner, we typically cut a puck out of plastic with an off center hole so it works as a cam and can act as a … tensioner
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