In recf pinnacle what are you using your 3d printing ability’s for?
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In my case I’m planning on using 3d printing for magplates and custom bracing in hard to reach places or just for lighter alternatives.
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In Engage I will be printing 1x4 Crank Arm with 23 Tooth Gears.
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Omg that is amazing!!! First major thing I have seen made out of 3d printed parts. Is that within the limit of how many plastic pieces u can have?
Yes! It is printed in 6 smaller parts(3 per side). The pieces just slot together and then you can run a screw through it to lock it in place!
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Ran across a 3D Model of the Pinnacle field on MakerWorld - printing it now:
https://makerworld.com/en/models/3019589-vex-recf-pinnacle-mini-field#profileId-3392434
Very cute, maybe someone can come up with board game rules for it.
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Nice drivetrain, something that’s very popular in VEXU is a motor mounting technique we call a “motor socket”, where the part itself replaces the cap of the motor using the little phillips head screws. Saves a solid half inch of space and looks way cleaner. Now, does this really matter most of the time? No, but I like it and thought I would share.
I would send photos of it assembled but the forum is limiting me to one image
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For grins, post one image per day or two - keep readers engaged for a week or two 
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Here are some examples from Push Back last year from our university team, KUdos. If you are printing your drivetrain already, I would highly reccomend looking into using your prints as motor caps, as like @Ely_Wickandeer said, they can save about 1/2" in the center. (Also note sure why I don’t run into the image limits. I’m copy pasting from Discord so maybe that is different than using the “upload” button)
In the first and second image, we needed packaging for an h-drive pod in the center on a 15" robot, so we absolutely slammed the motors as far out as possible. This led to having drivetrain shafts of 7/8" long, with gears on the outside of our wheels instead of inside
This third image was from our early season robots for Push Back, where we went with a more conventional motor cap design, where we can take off the entire motor “pod” with the cap and motors for easy swapping instead of swapping the motors themselves
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Any chance I could get an explanation of the H-drive pod on the second image? It looks crazy funky lol
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Yeah for sure. https://youtu.be/oRwvQ2D_B-c?t=37. This video shows the h-drive pod in action and is the original inspiration for ours.
Here is a video of ours during testing below. The mechanism is known as a rocker style h-drive pod, where instead of a regular h-drive pod wheel that is always in contact with the ground, this one rocks back and forth. The rocking is important for a few reasons.
For Push Back, when the pod is inactive, it is banded up so that we have enough ground clearance for double parking. It also digs into the tiles more, providing more surface contact and traction, as the robot is physically lifted up by the pod itself, with more weight being on the pod wheels than the front-back wheels. You can see this in the video where the drivetrain kind of jumps up a little, and that is why the robot strafes so well, because it has most of the weight on the h-drive pod and therefore more traction.
The rocking is caused by the inertia of spinning the wheels, and the whole pod rides on a “zombie axle”. This is both a dead and live axle (think a “dead” screw joint, and a “live” low strength shaft combined), where we are transmitting motor power through the live high strength shaft to spin the wheels, but the pod is “screw jointed” on the high strength shaft as well for the actual rocking motion.
I go into full detail on my portfolio website here (and other season robots) if you are interested in some other cool mechanisms. I’ll try to get photos up soon for Sally & Cruz and Luigi & Guido. (I also still need a domain lol). Let me know if you have any questions, and we can start a new thread instead of derailing this one.
https://portfolio-website-three-ebon-70.vercel.app/projects/sally-and-cruz#rocker-strafe-pod
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we are using 3d printing to make a casse for the battery.
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