We wanted to prove that there was a legitimate use for bevel gears because certain members of our team believed that VEX bevel gears weren’t reliable or efficient enough to use on a competition VEX robot. We also wanted to put more thought into our flag holder than hastily screwing a standoff into the robot right before we got the robot inspected.
The idea of using pneumatic tubing on the flag holder came from when I put a ~12" piece of pneumatic tubing in our hand drill. Instead of spinning an a circle like you would expect the pneumatic tubing both rolled and spun, making a really cool pattern. The pattern became more pronounced when I put a flag in the pneumatic tubing. We wanted to duplicate that effect on our robot, but since it wasn’t practical to have a flag hanging off of 12" of tubing we settled on using about an inch of tubing. By the way, none of you should do this at home or at your robotics lab because putting something in a drill without knowing what will happen is dangerous and could result in serious injury, death, or a surprise lobotomy.
Those are actually zip ties. We used them as a floor for our robot’s intake. Our robot did not have the ability to pick up another ring once it was already holding a ring.
@ the bevel gear comment
last year we actually used those as our main DRIVE gearing!
we wanted to mount the drive motors 90degrees up so we could widen the basket space for last year’s balls
our brother team also tried that this year but the HS motors shattered the bevel gears
they are only supported one way with the axle…
I subscribed to this topic so I’m getting e-mail updates and it’s late!
Bevel gears are useful, but a bit of a pain to mount.
254A did something neat again this year, which is completely normal for them.
Custom flag holders are cool and teams should definitely earn bonus points for them. I challenge some team to make an LED flag, and to be clear the word “VEX” must be readable on it and the surface must be some kind of cloth type material.
High-res pics rule (which is why I paid a crap ton of money for my Cannon T2i). Now if I could only afford an acceptable lens… Grr.
And umm, oh yeah. Almost forgot that other teams besides 254A actually attended that event. Once again Piratech gave the Poofs a run for their money yet the Poofs still spanked them. Wonder how long that will continue.
In other news, team 1902 (FRC) Exploding Bacon invited me to the FRC kickoff. My plan is to mentor them in 3ds max this season, and who knows maybe I’ll go with them to the FRC championship seeing as I won’t have anything else going on that particular week (big massive HINT).
If you look closely at the back of the robot, there is half of a metal bar lock that sticks out from the top of the rail that is just to the port side of the center of the robot. We tucked both flags under that bar lock to start the match.
Seems like someone had a lot of fun… I’d like to see the analysis on how much drag that places on the gears and motors, and how much power they lose because of a tiny bevel gear…
And yeah… I’ve got a couple really wacky ideas I’m trying to get my team to do… Unfortunately, they like building functional robot parts… They aren’t too crazy on the idea of wasting time on things that don’t help them…
Hey, just a comment on bevel gears. My team used bevel gears for our main loading and scoring mechanism. There was a lot of argument whether they would transfer power well enough and hold up in a competition. We built very strong mounting brackets, and they haven’t failed us yet. We have won 3 regional tournaments so far with our design. The only thing with bevel gears, you have to make sure to built a strong mounting bracket, and don’t put too much of a load on them. We used several bevel assemblies to spread out the load.
It’s a lot of fun watching 254A, ever since we won the Championship of the America’s with them we have been really excited to see how our robot will match up with theirs. I’m really looking forward to getting to compete with all you teams, will I be seeing any of you at the National Tournament? If you come, drop by my team’s pit, 3018.
just a side note, who was the team/school on the same alliance as DT? (the red shirts)
i think i recognize that guy but did he change clubs??
maybe its just me…
Thanks for the link! This works great! The videos are not as clear on my smart board, but I seriously doubt my students will care.
This is one awesome set of videos, and I am amazed at team 254.
This is what it is all about, isn’t it? Giving students the chance to learn that there is a fantastic future for them.
Thank you so much!
And, yes, to others, I do realize that revealing your robot before the world wide competition may cause problems for you, but I, quite honestly am about to confront about 20 students who want to know what robotics is.
This is the best series of videos that I have found to date.
When we first bent the aluminum the aluminum weakened at the bend to the point that it would never be as strong again no matter how carefully we bent it back.
They held the rings better then when we used the regular motors.
We did have polycarb but we didn’t use it because we wanted to first build it with aluminum so that we could get the spacing right. By the time that we finished the robot we didn’t have enough time to redo and test the intake with polycarb before we had to pack the robot for the tournament.
We also didn’t use polycarb for our intake at Pan Pacific because we built the intake while we were there because our claw (which was made of polycarb) didn’t work as well as we wanted it to.
When we first started experimenting with polycarb we didn’t think that we had the proper tools in the garage where we built to cut it so I had to take it to my house to cut it with my scroll saw and my notcher. We eventually realized that we could cut polycarb with an interesting combination of our hole saws, dremel, and hack saw. Another note of caution: if you cut polycarb with a dremel it ends up melting more then cutting; when it melts it releases supposedly toxic gases.
If you are still having trouble downloading videos from Youtube try using Zamzar at Zamzar.com You can tell it to convert the videos to any format you want, I like to use AVI as it is universal to most computers and portable players. Youtube used to be blocked in my school so I would find videos at home, then put them into Zamzar to convert. Zamzar will send you a link to download the converted video and I could do that from school as Zamzar was not blocked.
