I was just wondering which team do u think used firsts gearboxe the best. isaw a lot of team modify and i just wanted ur opinion.
We opt-ed to use the FIRST gear boxes. (Team 292) We powered each side with 1 drill and 1 chalupa. (Chalupa = CIM) Ran that through the FIRST gearbox to a sprocket. From there we reduced it even further to the wheels. A lot of our power and traction came from our 8" pnuematic wheels.
I’m not saying we used them the best, but a lot of teams had a very hard time pushing us around ('cept for 25).
One of my favorite matches was during the finals in Chicago. Huskies had their legs planted in the grid, we came up and pushed them off the top. 45 gave us a slight nudge to help at the end, but we had them mostly off by that point.
Here is the link to the match on SOAP
http://www.soap108.com/2003/movies/il/il_fm1.asf
Team 662 had drills and CIMs for drive this year. Since the CIMs are about 4x faster than the drills/planetary gearboxes, we used two black 2:1 gearboxes per side to gear down the CIMs 4:1. We then hooked the drill motors/planetary gearboxes to the final output shaft of the gearboxes. We also had a sprocket on the output shaft and geared down the motors some more. We used these 8" pink pneumatic tires we found at Harbor Freight, and the whole setup proved to be great for both speed and power. We could push around anyone we needed to.
*Originally posted by Halon *
**Team 662 had drills and CIMs for drive this year. Since the CIMs are about 4x faster than the drills/planetary gearboxes, we used two black 2:1 gearboxes per side to gear down the CIMs 4:1. **
Sounds inefficient but a good idea. How much space did it take up?
It might have been inefficient, but for a 2-minute match, who cares? We did run down our batteries pretty quickly, though. You can see a pic of our bot with the gearboxes installed here.
Although I saw many teams use the provided miter boxes, I did not see any robot that used them in the way that we did.
We put the motors on the side 90 degrees of where the FIRST plans had them. We gave a straight output to our main drive. Using the helical gears (lightened and on one side set of right-hand gears opposed to the provided left-hand), we provided a 90 degree drive to our “crab” wheels. So, we effectively had 1 input and 2 outputs from each of the miter boxes.
This really is the best picture that I have exhibiting how we used them; our crab wheels go inside the aluminum 2x4s where the triangles move up and down: