Gears and Gear Ratios


In Lego Robotics gears can be utilized to tremendously affect your robot's power and speed. However, you will always have to choose between one or the other. If you wish your robot to have speed it will not have power but on the other hand if you which your robot to have power it will not have speed. Gear trains are made by connecting gears side-by-side, making the gears mesh. When one of the gears moves the other one will too. Below is an example of a gear train:

Success

We have solved the "Smart Medicine" mission, thus scoring 50 points for our team. We have a device on our robot that spins forward 1/16 of a rotation and releases the buckyball in fornt of the "bone" to make it land in it. This is our robot:

Unrobust

Sean and Shayna are modifying the robot because it isn't very robust and the swivel keeps coming off. By using pins and beams they were able to make it more roboust and they also attached the light sensor in such a way that it is low enough to detect the color of the "Smart Medicine" mission. Despite this success, upon further testing and examination you can see that the gears don't mesh well. While testing the gears and trying to fix the problem a disaster occured... the whole robot started to fall apart so we had to rebuild it. After school I will begin to rebuild it.