9 and 10:1 versas have a tendency to fail in high torque situations.
Options include:
get an am sport gearbox for your end stage.
Add more stages to the versa, and have lower ratios at the torque end.
Counterbalance your arm using a gas shock or bungy or springs.
Slow the motion of your arm and lower the acceleration rate as well through controls.
Get a rev maxplanetary kit with a 3:1 at the end and feed the versa into it (if you can get one)
3:1 5:1 7:1 9:1 will lower the torque on the 9:1 and remove the often broken 10:1. That sill exceeds anything a versa should geared for, but it might live longer. Put the 9:1 against the motor.
I did not realize there was a load table, and am rather amused at the state of affairs now. We basically did say “I know it needs to be high” and aimed for something reasonable. If we have the supplies/space/time to get a chain and sprocket system going, I think that would work best for us. At the very least, I know not to have a 10:1 be our output stage connected directly to the arm.
A counterbalance with a bungy (bungee is more familiar to me) is easy to install, as we have those in the shop, so we will take y’all up on that suggestion.
It might be a little late to start doing the calculations at this point, but I highly recommend going through the exercise of analyzing the mechanics of a design. If you know total mass and center-of-mass (relative to the pivot point), you can calculate torque. Once you know torque, you can calculate back to a reasonable speed range (i.e. probably don’t want 1000 deg/sec, but probably want more than 2 deg/sec). ReCalc will also factor in motor choice, current limits, efficiency loss, etc. Plug-n-chug is a perfectly valid approach here as well, just to get you in the right range.
I suspect you’d be fine with something in the 200:1 to 400:1 range for total reduction, though I don’t know the design of your arm. Try to do 2:1 or 3:1 in a chain reduction to reduce the stages needed for the planetary gearbox. With those numbers, your planetary gearbox would need something between 66:1 and 200:1 (granted, non of that range is within the acceptable load range for a NEO or Falcon500 per the published guide, but it’s a lot closer than you currently are)
I’ve been doing this a while, and this jumped out at me. Instant source of issue.
It does three things. First, it reduces the shock load (chain and belt have a wee bit more stretch, plus whatever you use to tension the chain can help). Second, it reduces what you need in the gearbox itself, which allows you to use some tougher stages. Third, having a decently large sprocket can help spread out the torque on the arm end a little bit.
The bold part scares me a bit. It’s doable, but now you’re adding a decently-sized shaft, with load on both ends. Not ideal. You don’t get any extra torque from this unless you’re adding a second motor.
Just for grins:
What motor setup are you guys using for this, currently? A 900:1 reduction seems insanely high to me, almost like you’re running a 775Pro for the entire arm load. (Note: I don’t recommend this.)
Also, approximate mass and length would help. Fletch is 100% on the right track here, some math required.
My team, 3512, found ourselves exactly where you are in 2019. We built a carriage arm that used a VP live axle setup with a small gear reduction of the VP to the arm pivot axle. This setup absolutely sucked and broke in every way imaginable:
shredded VP gears and housings
twisted hex shaft, yes including steel hex shaft
sheared hex shafts
cracked 20DP hex gears, including steel gears
more slop than what was reasonable for software to manage
We tried very hard to learn from the lessons of 2019 and use them in designing our 2023 carriage arm. I laid out some some arm best practices in this thread last month (read the whole thread, lots of good advice):
The biggest 3 pieces of advice I can can give you are:
Absolutely do not use VersaPlanetary gearboxes for high torque arms
Use a dead axle setup with a round aluminum tube
Use tensioned chain for your final reduction, the chain will help absorb shock loads and has substantially higher tooth engagement
Here’s our 2023 arm which incorporates most of the advice I laid out in the shared link above:
Slight self promotion, but what motor are you using?
I would recommend using a chain reduction on top as it helps with shock loads. We are running 2 neos on a 72:1 on our arm and have no issues, but if you run like a single 775 you might run into problems.
We used constant force springs this year and it took a huge load off of everything. They are really strong springs but you can move our arm with one finger.
We know the spring print looks canted and that was due to putting a washer as a spacer because the first print was a little off. New print with no washer solved it.
Edit: do not try to put springs that strong on a PLA print. The material used for those print is CF-12 whish is one of the strongest if not the strongest printable material.
They will take you eye out. Ideally they should have some sort of guard or at minimum the attachments have a very high factor of safety with hazard training for the people around the robot.
For the OP: The Banebot sport gear boxes sold by Andymark gear boxes I recommend for arms. As others have said, don’t mount the gear box directly to the arm. Chains or belts will adsorb some of the shock loading. Current limit the motor. With that much reduction you have the power to break things. If you can add something that slips when over loaded.
900:1 sounds like way too high a gearing to me. I personally won’t design anything that requires much more than 100:1. To make up any additional force I use springs to counterbalance.
How long (from axis to rotation to COG) and heavy is the arm? 900:1 seems perhaps a little high to me unless the arm is absolutely massive. We did the calculation for a 15 lbs, 36 inch arm and landed on a ratio of 200:1 by using ambcalc and aiming for a ratio that would be at max efficiency at 12V. It’s possible you’ll need a bigger ratio because we are only aiming for the low goal, but also you can get more power if you sacrifice efficiency.
In our case we achieved a 200:1 reduction with a 5:1 VP, the WCP Rotation Gearbox geared at 58:18 and 52:18 and a 15:64 chain reduction using #35 chain.
As others have said, using 10:1s after the first reduction stage is highly suspect (some teams have sworn off 10:1 gears entirely).
Driving your arm with chain helps in two ways. First, you can get extra reduction by using a bigger driven sprocket, allowing you to remove the highest loaded gear stage. Secondly, my understanding is that chain is a bit stretchy, so it helps account for shock loads (extreme but temporary loads that can occur when moving the arm back and forth or running into objects).
I would think switching to a dead axle setup would have less effect in preventing gears from breaking and more of an advantage of preventing your output shaft from twisting.
We got two of these and have been very happy with them. They are heavy, but ours are mounted very low, with chain running up to the two joints. We also have tensioners on the chain situated so they can help take up shock load. We ordered these early on, when the arm prototypes were really heavy. But we don’t need to use the chain for reduction, which helps keep things compact. Overkill, but would probably stay with this choice even with a lightened arm.
The mounting job is poor, but we wanted a quick proof of concept. Even at 900:1, the arm falls under its own weight, so hopefully the springs/cords will help mitigate that.
The competition robot will have this arm mounted on single cascade stage elevator mounted diagonally on the robot. We’re using a mini-CIM, and the output shaft is 1/2". The arm length is still under discussion, but it should be around 36 inches, and if we can redesign our elevator, we might increase the arm length toward 48 inches. I also don’t know the weight, but will estimate it to be between 10 and 15 pounds.
I can get exact measurements on Saturday when I’m able to be with the team.
