Thursday, July 30, 2015

Improvised hubs for McMaster-Carr Wheels

McMaster-Carr sells some very nice wheels that are used in industrial applications for moving products, sheet materials, and more they are called "Drive Rollers" on their site. These wheels have been shown to have many applications for FRC teams such as collector and shooter wheels.

These wheels are great but they don't come with any hub and they can be difficult for teams that don't have access to a lathe or a hex broach to use with standard FRC gearboxes and motors.


It's very common for teams to use hex shafts to transfer torque from a motor to a wheel. Using hex hubs is one option to accomplish this and works well for most wheels designed for FRC. Once you want to use an industrial wheel for some application it become much harder to adapt them to hex shafts.

VEXpro hex collars and aluminum tubing can often allow for teams without a lathe or a hex broach to use these types of wheels.


For the Sure-Grip wheels we have been able to use two VEXpro shaft collars as a hub for those wheels. The built in hub is a 1" diameter and the shaft collars are slightly smaller than this about 0.96 inches. We use the included set screws to tighten the shaft collar down on the shaft. This worked very well for us this season and we never had an on field failure.


We haven't used these wheels in competition yet but they have been popular with other teams such as 1114 and 2056 in Ultimate Ascent as their Frisbee shooter wheels.

These wheels have a 1.25" inside diameter (ID) which is too large for just the shaft collars. To solve this problem we used a small aluminum pipe cut to the correct length. For these wheels we used a 1.25" OD and a 1" ID aluminum pipe from McMaster-Carr: 9056K37 and we cut down the piece to around 0.92" long. To assemble these we used a small arbor press. An inexpensive arbor press can be purchased at Harbor Freight

With both wheels it's important to remember you are trying to get the hex hubs to be flat inside the tube so the wheels will turn close to true (flat without wobble). These hubs will work better at low speeds since at high speeds the fact that the hubs aren't completely true can cause heavy vibrations.

These wheels can then be installed directly on a 1/2" hex shaft such as the output shaft of a Versa Planetary gearbox.

The other benefit of this method is that all of these are COTS parts and the assembly can be completed easily at an event without counting to your withholding allowance weight.

- Spectrum

"If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation." -John Ashcroft

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Spectrum News - Summer is coming to an end

Parents Meeting Aug 4th, Texas Robot Roundup, and more
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Parents Meeting

August 4th 5:30 to 6:30 PM


RSVP at this linkhttps://goo.gl/XgXGy1

We are going to start having parent meetings roughly every other month on the first Tuesday of the month from 5:30pm to 6:30pm.

There will be a meeting on August 4th, October 6th, November 3rd, January 5th,,  March 1st & May 1st. All these dates are on the Spectrum Calendar Calendar.spectrum3847.org

This month's meeting will be pretty quick just talking about the new year and the things we have planned and things we can do better.
 

Texas Robot Roundup

July 31st-Aug 1st

We will be leaving the morning of Jul 31st at 6:30am.
Staying one night at

COMFORT INN
700 Delmar Ave, Austin, TX, 78752, US
Phone: (512) 302-5576 Fax: (512) 302-4828
 
And returning the evening of Aug 1st, probably pretty late between 10:30pm and 11:30pm.
 
If you aren't signed up please sign up on this form.
'
For the event schedule and more information please visit the main event page here.
http://ift.tt/1UZkqph

During the event you can watch the webcast on TheBlueAlliance.com

SPETaculaR

Our summer robotics camp is in progress. If you need service hours please volunteer to help.

End of Year Surveys

If you haven't filled out the end of year survey's please do so.


Parent Survey

Team Member Survey


Alumni Survey -  For new alumni and past alumni that want to keep us updated.

Summer Dates

  • July 13th - 24th - SPECTaculaR Course at Spring Branch Boys and Girls Club, great way to get service hours
  • July 31st Aug 1st - Texas Robot Roundup, off-season event in Austin
  • Aug 8th - Food Distribution Volunteering at Strake
  • Labor Day Weekend - Off-season Event
There will be more dates added but these are the ones we know about now.
Copyright © 2015 Spectrum, All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is:
Spectrum
9000 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77036

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Monday, July 6, 2015

Spectrum News July 2015 - Off-season recap, Food Distribution, etc

Recaps of TRI and RoboReboot, Food Distribution every month, etc
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SPECTaculaR 

Summer Programs Enriching Children Through Robotics

Hello everyone! SPECTaculaR is coming up in mid-July. Any amount of help is appreciated (you don't need to volunteer on all the days), and you can get up to 90 service hours for volunteering. No prior knowledge is needed to volunteer. Sign up here:
 
 
For those of you who don't know, SPECTaculaR is Spectrum's summer camp aimed toward teaching STEM to disadvantaged elementary & middle school students. It is located at the Spring Branch Boys & Girls Club (8575 Pitner Rd, Houston, TX 77080) & takes place for 2 weeks (July 13-24) from Monday to Friday, 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. We teach participants how to program LEGO Mindstorms Robots using slides like these:
 
 
This year, Alex Lednicky (one of my fellow St. Agnes seniors) & I will be running the camp. Thank you!
 
Sara Baltz

..

TRI 2015


The 2nd installment of TRI was a great event for our team and the other 23 teams in attendance. Thank you to all of our members and parents that volunteered to support the event. All the feed back we have gotten from teams and volunteers is that it was an excellent event and that we made it even better then last year. In the end CRyptonite FRC#624 (Cinco Ranch) repeated as TRI Champions, along with High Voltage FRC#231 (Pasadena), & Discobots FRC#2587 (Lamar, Carnegie Vanguard, etc). We are planning to hold TRI 2016 on Jun 24th, & 25th 2016.

Mobile Pantry: Monthly Food Distribution 

Every month Spectrum is assisting the Houston Food Bank with a Mobile Pantry in our Strake Jesuit parking lot. This takes place the 2nd Saturday of each month from 8am to 11am. If you are interested in volunteering please let us know, there is plenty of work for everyone.

In the past two months we have distributed food to 215 families, a total of 889 individuals

..

RoboReboot

Last week the team traveled to Ft. Worth for RoboReboot. We use this largely as a practice event where we have all of our participants drive the robot. This year it was a small event with only 14 teams in attendance. In attention we spent a day at Six Flags Over Texas.

Summer Dates

  • July 11th - Food Distribution Volunteering at Strake
  • July 13th - 24th - SPECTaculaR Course at Spring Branch Boys and Girls Club, great way to get service hours
  • July 31st Aug 1st - Texas Robot Roundup, off-season event in Austin
  • Aug 8th - Food Distribution Volunteering at Strake
  • Labor Day Weekend - Off-season Event
There will be more dates added but these are the ones we know about now.
Copyright © 2015 Spectrum, All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is:
Spectrum
9000 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77036

Add us to your address book


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Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp


from Spectrum Archive Feed http://ift.tt/1H5itOO