DERPDrive: The Assembly; Plus, Some Other Neat Parts: IG32 Gearmotors and Scooter Pulleys

It’s been a little while! My entire previous week was spent preparing and organizing the big summer MIT-SUTD go-kart race which went down on Sunday. Yes, that’s a thing. The summer class is not totally over yet, so that report will come shortly.

In the mean time, I want to pay attention to something which has been a little neglected over the past month as I devoted more resources and time to making sure the class ran on schedule and people were able to finish up. That something is DERPDrive, which, given that I found one of my structural frame tubes being used as a go-kart wheel chock the other day, was pretty damn forgotten. Luckily, it’s now assembled and already through one attempt at a test fit for which I could not conjure enough macho to accomplish. It’s general knowledge that I look just as home in a Miku costume as anything else, and sheer manpower is not one of my notable traits. The test fit will be repeated once I can get a team-lift going.

Here’s what all took place.

After watching the paint dry, DERPDrive was unceremoniously shuffled to one corner of the shop as the students’ build season really started kicking in. Over the course of a week or two, all kinds of mayhem landed in my parts box – from safety goggles to tools to other people’s drivetrain parts. One thing that I keep trying to instill in high-intensity overachieving engineering students is how to pick up your own droppings as you work, and how throwing all your tools from the day into the nearest bin doesn’t constitute cleaning up in the least. This occurs with varying degrees of success.

Since the primary mechanical parts of this thing had already been machined and ready weeks ago, all I needed to do was assembly. This went quickly:

In this configuration it has already been mistaken for a motorcycle jack or some kind of pressing tool.

The next steps in assembly included mounting the astronomically huge bearing blocks. Into these 1.25″ bore blocks will be mounted a solid (unless I feel like saving about 2 pounds out of over 100) 1.25″ steel keyed shaft. The holes next to it are for a 3/4″ steel auxiliary shaft, and holddown method for all of them is 1/2″ fine-thread bolts and grade-mismatched-because-that’s-all-i-could-find hex nuts. These things are surprisingly cheap on the surplus market.

They’re also built for serious slop. I assume the target market is people who assemble entire production machines in a cave, with a box of scraps, because every part of them is adjustable.

The mounts are slots, so they can slide back and forth. And the bearings are captured in spherical housings, so you can have shafts that are just eyeball-aligned. So that’s how Tony Stark did it.

The next degree of freedom to adjust is centering the 11″ go-kart wheel and hub in the center of the swingarms. I mounted the wheel on the hub and eyeball-aligned it, then clamped the hub in place. When the wheel is mounted, I can’t reach the keyway clamping screw , so this adjustment needs to be done beforehand. Normally, these hubs are used on the very end of an axle, not in the middle.

The Big Axle assembled. Notice the overlay on top of the frame jacks – this is 1/16″ 80A neoprene rubber glued to the steel. A thin compliant layer ought to increase the amount of friction generated by the jacking force. That’s the intention anyway – I don’t think I will have “detaching issues” when the wheel is down with a few hundred pounds on it.

Now this thing is getting scary. The 52 pound D&D sepex motor is now mounted, and I’m really, really having trouble wrestling this thing around on the bench. It is just now dawning on me that this might be a little more hardcöre than necessary.

But just think of how awesome of a go-kart it will make had already made! This motor has had an interesting MIT tenure for sure.

The midshaft is now mounted. The little sprocket for the final stage is behind the larger one in the front. Between the two stages, the total gear ratio is 8.66:1, which should yield a top speed of about 15 miles per hour (for a certain high field current of the motor – field weakening, a feature available in the Alltrax controller I’ll be using, will produce an artificially high top speed if acticated).

While the motor is capable of much more power to push the vehicle faster, recall that I’m gearing for a high enough thrust force to get the van out of my parking garage, not to do really awkward silent cruises in front of local night clubs while implying that I have something which hangs down really low.

This whole rig now weighs north of 110 pounds, and getting it down from the bench was probably one of the most precarious situations I’ve found myself in.

It’s time for a test fit…

The crime scene. The plan was to back DERPDrive, facing the right direction, under the two frame rails it will squeeze between, and then hold it in position while I tighten the jack screws.

Alright, I definitely didn’t think this through very hard. Minus the jacks, that’s roughly what the assembly’s going to look like once installed. I accidentally found out that my spring preloading setup works really well when I trapped the swingarm against a jack and was still trying to lower the whole thing.

After a multitude of jacks and bottle pistons and failed attempts at bench pressing the thing up to where it needs to go, I decided to give up before dropping the entire van on myself. This is gonna be a 3-hoodrat effort at the least, and I might need to fiddle my way back onto the lift. I got it almost there – but the whole “hold this thing with one arm while trying to reach the jack screws” thing was just not happening at all. This will certainly be troublesome in the future when I have to deal with 1000lbs of batteries and 200 pounds of Siemens motors. Now we know why I build little things most of the time…

What’s nice, though, is finally getting off the bench. Can you tell which half of this bench I parked one of my project heaps on for a month?

More DERPDrive will come after I secure a test fit!

slightly past unboxing: IG32 gearmotor, timing pulleys

I’m not sure I could call this section beyond unboxing, since there wasn’t much to unbox, so let’s roll with slightly past unboxing then?

It’s August, and there is exactly 1 thing I do in August and that is robots. I need to get my fleet gear for Dragon*Con, which is basically in three weeks including travel time. Yep, I’m in that situation again.

Here’s the situation. Überclocker desperately needs a new top clamp arm actuator since the previous one was so damaged at Motorama (see the bottom of the event recap). The leadscrew got pretty chewed up since it was the first thing to hit an opponent that really sunk deep into the fork, so it would bind at the top of travel. And it had more than enough bottom travel, letting the top clamp actually poke out under the fork, which was just unnecessary. Plus, the oddball chain drive I designed is only getting worse tension-wise, and it really has to go.

I wanted to rebuild the clamp actuator using a stock gearbox (so I can have multiple on standby) and not using those damned chains. It should be much lighter than the current half-a-drill setup I got going on, and not nearly as powerful, because there’s no reason to need a full 550 motor on grabby duty.

I already have a fast-travel (1/2″ per turn!) precision leadscrew and nut, so I’d just need to find a motor with higher ratio to get a manageable clamping speed. Going from 0.1″ to 0.5″ per turn would mean a motor that spins 1/5 as fast, or is 5x more geared down. This puts me in the neighborhood of a 30:1 gearbox with a 25,000 rpm motor (18v drill motor overvolted to 7S lipos, or 25.9 volts).

I took recommendations for reasonably nice gearbox, and one of the candidates (recommended by Jamisong) was the IG series from Super Droid Robots. I’ve seen these before, and had been eyeing them for a while, but never had a reason to buy one since I’d been well-pampered by chopping power tool motors. They seemed like a nice compact solution that I could merge with a 400-class motor for less weight.

So I ordered three for kicks, adhering to my 2n+1 Rule of Procurement for Stuff I Can Afford.  One for using, one for backup, and one for fucking around with!

Here they are! Cute little setups, really. The RS-380 class motor it comes with is quite possibly the mildest wound motor I’ve ever ran. The gearbox itself is constructed from a few die cast aluminum parts, and the ring gear is steel with an aluminum over-sleeve-wrap-thing.

…but that’s all I have to say that’s productive and nice.

What is with you people and plastic gears?

The first stage is bullshit plastic! Ostensibly it’s for ‘noise reduction’, but all I see is cost cutting. I will gladly pay like $5 more for some metal in there.

Well there goes any potential of overdriving the motor significantly, or replacing it.

The difference in gear strength is incredible. So you go from 2.5mm thick plastic gears to 5mm thick steel. That’s way, way more of a torque increase than the plastic can handle. If those 2.5mm gears were steel, too? Certainly, then the progression of torque makes sense. But this is just cost cutting, one that happens in enough gearboxes today to piss me off.

So for $20, I’m not going to argue at all with what you get – I’m sure these things work for exactly what they were designed for. But damn, I’m not going to put up with this for actual robot use. Glad I got three – because my intention for the bot is to combined two of the gearboxes into one that has all-steel gears. The untouched one can be for emergency backup or something where I know I’ll have to go extra sissy on the throttle.

Next up on the list is something interesting I found on TNCscooters while I was putting together a weekly student group order list.

It’s a big timing pulley! Specifically, it’s a 5mm HTD pulley, 80 teeth, that has a center thread which mates with most threaded scooter hubs. These seem to come in three sizes.

Even though the material looks like very crudely cast aluminum, this is still good to see existing because typically, you can’t find HTD drive pulleys in very large sizes from industrial suppliers. At least not in a form which could mate to a purchased wheel in this sector of industry.

Here’s an example of the kind of rim you can thread these pulleys onto. The thing on the left is a typical 8×2 tire rim (example 1, example 2). For non-regenerative vehicles (which do not perform motor braking), you’d probably want a strip of teflon tape or other anti-seize tape on the threads, lest over time these two things become one piece of metal. For regen vehicles, there’s not much choice but to use some light threadlocking adhesive to prevent the pulley from unthreading upon motor braking.

If you aren’t inclined to use the cheesy cast aluminum thread, then those four little hole pilots in the center near the raised hub is the exact same spacing as the four lug nuts on said rims! So, you could do it standoff style by drilling through the pilot holes and bolting it directly to the rim.

This is a typical arrangement of the two parts. On the left side thread, you’d mount a band brake rim or brake disc adapter or similar.  This ought to help those who want a synchronous belt drive like melonscooter but have found that commercial HTD pulleys are a pain to interface to without machine tools.

So concludes another episode of Slightly Past Unboxing! Coming up next are a full report of this summer’s go-kart shenanigans, and a catch-up of what I’ve already been doing with the robots in preparation for Dragon*Con.

 

Loose Ends Roundup for the Week of the 14th: Adafruit Trip Summary, DERPDrive Painting, Melonscooter’s Battery, and What does a Colsonbot Do?

Here’s another one of those posts where I report up on like 17 things at once! Running (this time wholly my own – no more protection afforded by the likes of 2.007!) the summer go-kart class for the MIT-SUTD collaboration has been one hell of a time sink, so I can only get small incremental things done at any one time.

We begin first by recapping what all went down to get me on the Adafruit Ask an Engineer show this past weekend. The trip to NYC all started as a group desire to just hang out in the city for a few days; so I contacted Makerbot and Adafruit Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. to see if I can swing in anywhere and check them out. Sadly, Makerbot is too pro these days to afford a random visit to their production facility, but Adafruit gladly obliged with an invitation to their web show.

This trip was actually slated to be the very first major long distance haul for Mikuvan. None of us really expected to end up in the city – more like broken down in Rhode Island somewhere. I made sure to pack all the tools needed to service anything short of catastrophic driveline failure, and picked up a new compact spare tire (the stock full-size spare having rusted out seemingly years before, which I took in to get scrapped) beforehand from Nissenbaum’s up the street here.

I’m proud to say that it went down completely without incident. Now I have even less of a reason to dismantle the powertrain, right?

I even looped a new A/C compressor drive belt beforehand (came without one) to test the state of the air conditioning coolant circuit – and to my utter surprise, it blew totally cold. So there we go – all the amenities of a modern car with 9000% more “What the hell is that thing?”. By the way, the A/C still runs R12.

Above is a picture of the van right after arrival in Flushing, Queens.  The only downside, of course, is that it has juuuuust enough horsepower to climb the Whitestone Bridge at about 50mph constant velocity with the gas pedal floored. Horsepower is not something hastily-modified JDM cargo vans are known for, but the electric version ought to fix that. I’m aware the speed limit on the Whitestone seems to be 30mph, but the crowd of delivery trucks and NY-plated private cars huddled around me seemed to beg to differ. I’m sorry, everyone, for having no power whatsoever.

Anyways, Nancy sums up our discoveries about Adafruit well. I no longer think they are made of magic and open-source genome unicorns, but infinity work and dedication.

On this trip, I confirmed the engine oil consumption as about 1 quart per 700-800 miles highway driving, and more like 500ish-miles local (with more cold-starts and short driving trips).  This is a staggeringly high amount, but I don’t think most of it is burning up. During my pre-trip inspection, where I recorded all fluid levels and made sure things weren’t jiggly and double checked my brake rotor-pad-shoe-drum-line-fluid conditions (since it should at least be able to stop, nevermind go) I discovered some fresh oil slicks near the bottom of the timing belt cover and that area of the engine block. This tells me that I probably have a leaking crankshaft front oil seal, and could explain the terrible condition of the timing belt discovered prior to Operation: BAD TIMING. It also tells me the current timing belt might not live that long anyway. The exhaust does emit a brief burst of smoke when cold-starting after a few hours of sitting, so it could indicate a number of other things worn, like the valve guide seals which were suggested by more automotively inclined buddies. I’m willing to write it off to 20+ year old poorly maintained engine. The oil itself does not show excessive signs of burning – the shade isn’t particularly dark, nor does it smell like burned fuel significantly, so I’ll say that most of it is just physically leaking out.
The fact that I hauled ass a total of 450 miles without any hiccups is amazing in and of itself, I think…

derpdrive

Hey, if I’m not going full-on electric right away, let’s at least check in on the thru-the-road hybrid shop-pusher module. DERPDrive hasn’t moved an inch in the past few weeks save for painting (in the same round as Melonscooter2), and that process looks kind of the same:

I picked up a handheld sandblaster from Harbor Freight (this one) to pluck all the rust and scale off the welded steel tubing quickly. Along with a jug of 80 grit aluminum oxide, it took maybe an hour or so to reduce the major frame parts to fresh steel. Here’s a picture of the blasting in progress. By the end, I’d created a small ejecta ring of sand, and I was basically covered in sand in every place imaginable. To supply the blaster, I borrowed a 25 gallon compressor from the IDC shop.

I hung up the parts using picture hanging wire and gave them three coats of the same etching primer used on Melonscooter space a half hour apart. With some of the lessons learned from Melonscooter’s frame, and a bit more advice from more legitimate painters, these parts came out far more even in the end than the scooter frame.

Next up were three coats of black (the same black, again, as used on Melonscooter since I bought like 5 cans of the stuff). Notice how I started during the daytime and it’s now the dead of night. There’s still some “orange peel” areas, but overall, everything dried totally smooth. I ran out of clearcoat, so DERPDrive won’t get the same crisp and shiny finish (But you’re never supposed to see it anyway…)

The finished parts after sitting in cooler, drier air for a day or two.

After the paint fully cured, I began adhering rubber strips to the front and rear of the structure, the parts which will be jacking on the van frame. These are some moderately hard (70A) and thin (1/16″) BUNA rubber strips I bought, being attached with contact cement. A thin layer of compliant material will aid in the attachment in a way two metal on metal contacts cannot – especially given that I won’t be able to torque down the jackscrews fully given that the van frame is still some pretty wimpy stamped steel rails. Again, if this doesn’t work out (like I start popping spot welds), I’m just drilling through everything and attaching them with rivet nuts.The C-clamps are to keep the adhesive fully engaged with the welded steel parts.I hope to assemble DERPDrive soon – I got into another one of those cycles of opening up multiple project threads, unfortunately…

melonscooter

The only work I’ve been able to get in on Melonscooter2 recently has been constructing and balance-changing the battery pack. I also prepared the motor controller, a KBS48121, and most other chunks of wiring for immediate installation. What I have been missing is the timing belt and pulleys – I ordered them last week, but of course waiting for shipping is the killer here. After I receive these parts, everything ought to fall into place quickly.

This is the battery pack in the middle of assembly. I waterjet-cut some 1/32″ copper bus bars for the task. One of them, to the left, has a chunk cut out of it to act as a last-ditch +250 Fuse of Oh Shit Amps. Unfortunately, I had used the wrong design equation values to make the cross section – I think this is actually good for something like 800 amps. Oh well…

Check the fully assembled pack. I added two 6S independent balance leads just to check cell voltages with for now – I hope this pack will be maintained infrequently enough that just cracking open the battery box and alligator clipping to it every few months is enough. Worst case, now I have one of these guys that I’ll make a balance lead jack for. These cells were in wildly varying charge conditions, so I had to spend a day or two just pushing buttons on balancing chargers, but now they’re all within 20-30 millivolts of each other.

colsonbot

Colsonbot… Colsonbot..

Does whatever a colsonbot does

Can he spin? Can he win?

No he can’t! He’s a wheel.

The Battlebots crew up here has reached critical mass. Full disclosure: The real reason for testing Mikuvan to New York City and back was so I can take it to Pennsylvania and back this weekend! The event in question is the PA Bot Blast, and the MIT crew will comprise myself, Dane, Jamison (whom I welcome to the MITrap), and freshly dragged into the craze, Ben.

If I thought trying to wing it up a bridge with only 4 people was bad, then climbing the Allegheny Mountains with four people and robots is going to be really adventurous!

Colsonbot has been in planning since a joyous all-hands dinner at Motorama 2013. Basically, the idea is to build an entire fleet of 3-pound “beetleweight” class robots and sprinkle them about the arena  as a “multibot”, or multi-part entry, to cause trouble and mayhem. Oh, and they’d all be shaped like wheels.  They would be otherwise functional “shell spinner” type bots, but the shell itself would be made of a popular robot drive wheel, the Colson Performa.  I was basically tasked with whipping up a “mass produceable” prototype which we can make a box full and show up to any event with.

I’m proud to say that’s now well under way. To extend this post even further, here’s the work that I’ve done on the Colsonbot front in the past few months. Bear in mind that this sucker has to be ready to run in like 4 days. Luckily, all the parts are on-hand and ready, so I’m only doing some mechanical assembly work.

The way I planned Colsonbot is as a design which could be a successful shell spinner on its own, if only I didn’t put such a silly bouncy rubber shell over it. The drive should be 4WD for stability and traction, and the weapon drive should be as reliable as possible, though not necessarily the most powerful. Under all reasonable circumstances, it should keep rolling! Basically its strategy is to get smacked repeatedly and just roll away.

This is the basis of Colsonbot, a 6×2″ Colson Performa wheel. Typically you’d find these on 30 and 60lb (if not larger) bots. They were a staple of the early 2000s 60lb and 120lb pusher wedge – they paired well with the popular EV Warrior motor and some power wheelchair motors, so they were used widely by new builders. Now that the new builder typically starts in a smaller (e.g. 1 through 30lbs) class, they are less commonly seen than their smaller brethren in the 2 to 4 inch range.

One of the first things I did was to core out the Colson to as far as I thought was reasonable. This process should be repeatable for everyone in on this build, so I didn’t try making any fancy contours. The main body of the bot was consequently limited to about 4″ diameter x 1″ height, with an extra nub on top where the hub of the wheel is normally molded.

Check out those molding voids – someone just did not care at all. Typically, injection molded parts are rejected if they contain voids inside – a result of gas bubbles evolving in the material from impurities or just shitty sealing. However, an industrial caster is hardly a precision application, so I guess this is fine.

The nub in question. I found that the bore of the wheel was basically ready for two FR10 bearing (flanged R10 bearing with 5/8″ bore and 1 3/8″ OD) back to back, so the shaft support was potentially great. I hollowed out the bore as far as I was comfortable with given the Colson’s pseudo-spoked core.

Cored vs. stock, with FR10 bearing. If you actually want to buy these, be aware they are rarely sold as “FR10″ (in the vein of FR8 1/2” bore bearings, which are very common). Try searching G10 or FR2214 bearing instead. By the way, these are exact swap-ins for the horseshit bearings in common Harbor Freight wheels, like these or these (my favorite!)

This is where the fun part starts. Time to try stuffing an entire robot drivetrain into the hollow cavity of the Colson! The only motors short enough for the job were the Sanyo-type “micro” gearmotors sold by a number of places, including Pololu. Literally no other common robot motor (i.e. which we could all buy a bundle of) could fit, even in an “offset” 2WD application, while leaving enough space for the weapon motor and batteries, at least to my sophisticated (…apparently..) specification. I have my own doubts about how robust these very tiny motors will be given the high-impact application they will be in, but we shall see. I purchased a handful of 30:1 units for testing.

After some component shuffling, this is what I came up with. It’s actually shaping up to be a great bot. The four motors are placed in a nearly square wheelbase for best handling, and the weapon motor is off to one side. I decided on a spring loaded slide assembly to keep constant pressure on the shell, which has not been modeled yet.

The hardest part about this thing is the battery. I wanted to fit at least a 1Ah, 3S lithium battery into it, but sadly there were just no options available which could fit in the space required. I had to settle for a 800mah pack from Hobbyking, and even that (as you’ll see in a bit) was pushing it.

Wow, now we’re getting somewhere. I’ve designed this frame to be very quickly blasted off on a 3D printer. As a result, it’s actually the most product-like thing I will have built, yet. The body is all plastic with lids and snaps covering the important bits.

Now with more colson and other parts. The left part of the frame is where the motor will mount – it will be on a little dovetail slide assembly.

This is the mechanism modeled in more detail. I typically just model big blocks and geometric representations of parts until I get to them in earnest. The motor will have a “tire” made of rubber O-rings mounted around the outside. The motor in question is a Hacker A20-50S, first generation (i.e. without the obnoxious tailcone) that I have a few of thanks to my weird airplane friend Ryan. It was the only motor I could get in short order that was short enough yet had enough power. In the”mass production” Colsonbot, this will be replaced with an equivalent Hobbyking shady outrunner.

After the big mechanisms were settled, I began hollowing out cavities for other components and making wire guides.

Here’s a picture of most of the guts installed. The master parts list rundown is:

  • Leftover Turnigy Plush 18 for the weapon controller
  • Hacker A20-50S 1Gen for the weapon drive
  • Vextrollers for main drive
  • Hobbyking T6A receiver guts for the receiver
  • Z800 3S 20C pack for the battery

The center axle is a 5/8″ fine thread bolt with the head machined down for fitness and hollowed out for weight. I don’t think there will be any problems with robustness for the joint between bolt and plastic frame.

I’ve moved onto designing covers and plates here. The motors mount only using the frame members to clamp them in place. They’re square and of a known length gearbox-wise, so this was actually quite easy. It is the same system in use on Pop Quiz 2 to clamp its own 4 Sanyo-style micro motors.

With the battery cover done, it was fine to export everything as STLs and 3D-print all the parts in ABS plastic.

I popped these into a Dimension 1200SST and ran out the last bits of a cartridge with it. I would have tried this on our shop Replicator 1, but just had this sense of hopelessness from the amount of weirdly sticking-out parts.

Test fitting parts now. The motors snap right in – I could almost just run these as-is without the bottom cover!

One issue I found was with the 3/4″ Dubro airplane wheels I bought. I’d never drilled them out before – Pop Quiz 1 used the same wheels back in 2005, but with their stock 2mm bores. It turns out their hubs are no more than about 3.5mm diameter in the center, so when I drilled them to 3mm to fit the Sanyo-style micro motors, there was nothing left to drill and tap into.

Well damn. I quickly whipped up a set of 3/4″ o-ring wheels to be 3DP’d to get around this issue.

Remember the battery? Hobbyking’s dimensions should be considered to be +1mm in all directions in the worst case. I designed this battery compartment using their given dimensions, but when I actually got the battery, it didn’t fit!

Just barely, however. The heavy plastic wrapping they use to shield the pack against punctures sort of got in the way. So what do you do in this case? Cut the damn thing up and just use the 3 cells totally naked. Hey, they’ll have some thicker plastic armor once in the bot anyway. I intend to do this to the 3 packs I got for this thing as spares.

Colsonbot should be all together in the next 2 or 3 days, so definitely stay tuned for this one!