Today was the club rush for my highschool meaning as captain of the FRC team I had to be there to try and recruit new Freshmen. Last year we struggled to get any members who would stick around but it really wasn’t a problem with the program or team it was a problem with passion. From what I could tell no one wanted to do it enough to put in the time and effort they needed to for the team to succeed which happens sometimes. I am just hoping this year we get some Freshmen who are really motivated to do it. We had about five or six kids sign up and three of them really expressed how much they wanted to do FRC which is awesome!
Either way, I have a lot of passion for FRC and robotics and the season is only a few months away meaning its time to start designing useful systems for the season. Today I created a lead screw nut that should work with a concrete drill thing we got (here is a link). Using these we can get pretty fast linear motion because the pitch is so large. Compared to the 8mm leadscrews that GoBilda has,
From my measurments, the Bosch Bulldog Drill has a pitch of 1.2 inches. Pitch is basically how far a nut on the screw would move for every rotation. Now for an FRC linear lift typically you use cabling because it is very fast but it is also hard to keep it tensioned and requires a lot of maintenance. Lead screws, however, are much more solid and reliable, the only problem is they are slow because the pitch is usually designed for high torque applications. Sure we need torque but much less than an 8mm pitch lead screw provides. Using this new lead screw we should be able to get lifts that can move up to 4x faster than the 8mm lifts which would be amazing for FRC. Heres a little sneak peek of the CAD I made. Keep in mind the RPM in this animation is very low we could potentially have a motor attached that can get 600RPM or higher that’s about 12inches per second!
Devin Willis 