VEX Lift Gear Ratio Calculator

VEX V5 General Discussion Technical Discussion
#1

Using Auto HotKey, I have created a VEX Lift Gear Ratio Calculator.
It is still in its early stages, and does not account for rubber-band assist or friction.

Features:
-Should run on any windows machine
-Calculates Scissor, Chain, 4, 6, Reverse Double 4 and Reverse Double 6 bar lifts
-Estimates lifting time
-Does not calculate with stall torque, but with a percentage of the stall torque, as to not burn out the lift motors
-Customizable percentage of stall torque based calculations
-Ability to switch between 269 and 393 speed and torque configs
-Open source

MAYBE future features:
-Calculation of power draw
-Calculation of efficiency loss in gears and chain
-Other ratio calculations (drive train?)

Here is the source on Github.
If you have suggestions, feature requests, or bug reports, just post them below; or even better yet, fix/add it to the source code!
If the calculation is just plain wacky, please tell me. Thanks!
Lift Gear Ratio Calculator20130820.zip (551 KB)

#2

Nice idea. Too bad it doesn’t run on 32 bit Vista.

I’ll see if any of my teammates can get it to work.

#3

Your calculations seem to be be pretty good from what I saw. Your interface has two bugs though:

1.) The arrow keys and labels overlap (picture attached)

2.) the arrows stop after 100 for angle, stages and weight although aside form angle I can’t imagine anyone would need anything even remotely close to that.

But other than those two little things it looks good. If I have to go to lift system number nine I’ll defiantly be using this for ballpark numbers.
Lift Gear Ratio Calculator.png

#4

I updated the application and added a few new features:
-Customizable percentage of stall torque
-Customizable percentage of output speed
-Ability to switch between 269 and 393 speed and torque configs

I think the bugs you (rnew713) mentioned are now fixed.
Please go to the OP for the new files.

#5

It doesn’t work on Win 7 32 bit either.

#6

+1
Maybe it doesn’t support 32 bit？ What a pity！困惑：

#7

This is actually a really easy / simple program. I was going to port it to Java so everyone could use it, but then I realized that good old JavaScript could do it on the web which everyone here can access.

So here is the web-based calculator.

It functions exactly the same as the program Joseph posted, only difference is that it is HTML5 compliant and will run in any modern browser. If you want the source, just view it - the entire calculator is contained in that single HTML file.

A general gear-ratio calculator like this would be neat too, I might work on one later.

One concern I have is how Joseph handled the linkage and tension fields. It’s based on the numerical value (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) of the radio box, which I don’t like at all. I’d rather assign a value to each option and just use that. I suspect that this was a limitation of whatever thing you used to create this.

Anyway, that’s what I got. Whew that was more work than I expected. -Cody

#8

Wow, I love the online version Cody!
In the future I may change the radio box code into reading from an array.
Currently, a variable gets a value from 1 to n, n being however many radio boxes are listed.
I will try to get this to work on 32-bit. (I have 64, it may have auto-compiled for 64-bit.)

#9

I find it amusing that the windows program runs fine on Linux but not on 32 bit windows

That being said, I love the program! Thank you very much for sharing :smiley:

#10

What do you mean by Linkage?

#11

It appears to indicate how the power is transferred from the motor to the lift. Click the drop-down menu to view examples.

#12

I updated the offline version. It should now work on 32-bit. (But it might not. :p)
[ATTACH]7580[/ATTACH]
Lift Gear Ratio Calculator20130821.zip (358 KB)

#13

Love the web calculator, simple and works great. Not to be a nit-picker but I did happen to find a typo lol

-1069E

#14