You didn’t want it, you didn’t ask for it, but regardless it’s available now
Team 1720 experimented with using this motor during our 2018 season’s intake prototypes and it ended up on our competition robot as the elevator carriage intake motors. We stalled them early and often and didn’t kill one until our final off-season event.
Finding a way to mount and use the motors was the most difficult part - they’re hard to mount, the motor leads are on the front of the motor and it uses a non FRC-friendly pinion gear. However, every team gets 4 each year in their kit of parts and there are likely many sitting in a dusty box somewhere in your shop. It seemed silly to not have an easier way to mount them, so we set off to make something that would work with the ecosystem that we’ve already bought heavily into - the versaplanetary gearbox.
Found in the link above are both an Inventor CAD file and an .stl 3D print file that should allow you to create the adapter plate.
Once you print the adapter, you’ll need to remove the pinion from the motor shaft. This will reveal a 5mm shaft and will work with the same adapter collar that you use for any 775 series motor. Attach the versaplanetary adapter and bend the leads 90 degrees to expose them.
You’ll be able to re-use much of the existing versaplanetary hardware for attaching the adapter and one of the motor plate holes, but for attaching the other 2 motor holes we found some 6 screws and ground the heads down a bit. The holes are very close to the case of the versaplanetary.
That’s about it. This motor is extremely niche to say the least and I’d be surprised if anyone used this, but sometimes it’s just fun to see if you can make something “useless” a bit more useful. Feel free to modify as needed for your application and good luck in 2019!
I’ve attached the motor specs that I had on hand. Last year we used a 2:1 ratio using Tetrix gears. They’re not the same DP as the pinion on the throttle motor but they’re close enough to work.
We did run two motors off one motor controller so that was a nice bonus. We’ll see if that’s legal again in 2019.
What a Christmas miracle! Thank you our lord and savior Ryan Dognaux! Can’t wait to make these into a drivertrain now!
But really, at the very least this makes it a ton easier to use these motors for educational purposes during the off-season even if they don’t end up on an FRC robot. Considering we literally have a bag full of these unused it’ll be great for little student projects.
I’d estimate there are over 100,000 of these motors sitting in drawers. Now maybe a few more teams can use them even if it is just for learning purposes.
It’s only a meme until someone wins an event with a throttle motor on their robot
I suppose so I’d love to see any pictures of how you integrated it into your robot. I’m sure these get used by a handful of teams every year but nobody ever posts how they used them.
I don’t have any pictures right now – up until today I never wanted to admit that we used throttle motors on a competition robot, but maybe I can update with pics in early January.
Our integration was a simple 3D printed coupler from the stock pinion to 0.5" hex, giving 1:1 from the motor. Any further reduction was done in code. The shaft powered wheels to index balls 2 by 2 or 4 by 4, and the wheels that indexed the fuel had very little compression. We didn’t need much speed on the indexing, we didn’t need very much torque due to the small amount of compression, and we needed a solution to fit in a very small space due to robot design (~2" IIRC), so the throttle motor was the right choice for this application.
We never scored more than ~10kpa with the robot, but our shooters were definitely a major factor in at least one event win. It would’ve been a lot of work to use a non-throttle-motor for this application, so I consider this a win for #teamThrottleMotor.
Also, that robot, with the exception of the drive chassis, was nearly all wood. Maybe that’s another meme busted?
Throttle motors work great for low power applications, it’s interesting that they get so much flak. I’m surprised that one of the mounting holes for the motor lines up with the versaplanetary bolt interface and lets the motor be concentric with the gearbox, that’s a pretty clever implementation.
I think I opened the hole on the motor face plate up just a bit now that I think about it. It was pretty close. The oval shape on the adapter plate gives some flexibility too when assembling it.
