10 Foot Pound Boots for Terry

A sad day when your robot outgrows it's baby motors. On carpet this happened when the robot started to tip the scales at over 10kg. So now I have some lovely new motors that can generate almost 10 foot pounds of torque.

This has caused me to move to a more rigid motor attachment and a subsequent modofication and reprint of the rotary encoder holders (not shown above). The previous motors were spur motors, so I could rotate the motor itself within its mounting bracket to mate the large gear to the encoders. Not so anymore. Apart from looking super cool the larger alloy gear gives me an 8 to 1 reduction to the encoders, nothing like the feeling of picking up 3 bits of extra precision.

This has also meant using some most sizable cables. The yellow and purple cables are 14 AWG silicon wires. For the uplink I have an almost store bought 12AWG and some hand made 10 AWG monsters. Each motor stalls at 20A so there is the potential of a noticable amount of current to flow around the base of Terry now.