Well, I figure now is the time in the season where most teams have a working drive together at least. Some may have some other things done too.
With the new addition of the Supershifter and the Stackerbox to the AndyMark catalog this year is going to come some very new sleek designs.
My question to you have used either so far is simply, what do you think? Do you like them? Do you not like them? Are they working for whatever application you designed them for?
I don’t work for AndyMark nor do am I trying to advertise them, but I figure these would be two popular COTS items this year so it may be nice to have a few reviews. Fire away.
this is our team’s first year where we haven’t used the stock gearboxes. We decided to go with a two speed transmission and bought the supershifters. they were over $800 dollars too. anywho, we were really exited to test em out. when we were putting them together we noticed we were missing a gear or something in each one but andy mark made good on that after we let em know. the second thing was how we had to make this spacer for the gear that comes off of the CIM. (we’re only running one CIM per side even though they can accomodate two) So far they seem to work well although we don’t have them working on the robot yet. we were testing the gear tooth sensor that it comes with and it works really well and also since we’re not using pneumatics we have to use the servo to shift. If you are using this setup I would strongly recommend using a recharge circut for your backup battery. I noticed when we were testing how long it took to shift, the time increased greatly and would almost stop completly when the backup battery gets low. I’ll let you know more when we have our robot driving around
It is very important to have the back-up battery fully charged. During a recent presentation, our robot decided to veer left while we were shifting into high gear and nearly took out a display case. Apparently there was enough power to shift one side only. An option might be to use the pneumatic system.
We had a slight gear misalignment (less that .01") inside one of our supershifters, so every rotation we’d hear one of the teeth hitting something. We slightly beveled that particular gear and haven’t had a single problem with anything since. We’re stoked.
We have over half of our allowable robot budget committed to the four SuperShifters that are going on the robot. We were worried a little about that, but actually more concerned about the 4.7 pounds per shifter that had to fit within the weight limits. But as Andy has noted, the SuperShifters have a LOT of room for weight removal. We have already carved a pound out of each one without even really trying, just by lightening the spacer block and large drive gears, and carving down the servo mounting block (since we are going with the pneumatic option). And there is still some more that can be done to get them even lighter. We have torn them down and rebuilt them probably two dozen times already, and they go together without a hitch. When they are fired up and running, all I can say is - these things are sweet!
