Tripolar Build for Pound of Pain 2006

For the next Pound of Pain (aka 12 Pounds of Pain) I wanted only to fix the darn weapon motor problems. I still attributed the issues to a combination of heat and shock, and wanted to isolate the motors more and gear them lower. The drive system worked pretty well and the electronics and frame did too. I wanted to stick to the drive ESC mount and bolting the weapon shaft in. I also like the power of the HF drill motors even though they caused some radio difficulties and were kind of big.

Right around this time the company Bane Bots came out with a big line of gearmotors. They had ones that were suited for all bots 30 pounds and under and were basically slightly nicer packages for drill gear motors. The 36mm motors they offered were extremely similar to the motors from Team Whyachi that The F-Bomb used to get first place at Motorama. The whyachi motors used a steel ring gear, and so were .25 pounds heavier than the BaneBots ones, but they were also very sturdy as evidenced by the F-Bomb's performance. I decided to give them a try. Several months later because of the arguments about who had the motor design first, Team Whyachi decided to just discontinue their version of the gearmotors which was a bummer since I had decided to build my bot around them. In the end the motors kept on trucking until I changed solutions several versions later so it worked out ok for me.

The upgraded drive motors were much smaller than the old version so I was able to pull them toward the center of the bot quite a bit. This provided enough space outside the wheels that I could actually have separately mounted rollers for the shell that were driven by belts instead of directly from the weapon motor shafts. I wish I had a picture but all I have is this cad layout. I was hoping that isolating the weapon motors entirely from the shell would spare them the shock damage to the magnets. check out how the bot did at the event.