Open Source Ecology Power tool construction set, 17 Jul 2012

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From YouTube: How to: turning a cordless drill into a robot drive motor.

Description

I was taking yet another drill apart for use in our next combat robot and thought I might be able to help some people out by making a video of the process.

If requested, I can make a more in-depth video on how these drills perform in combat, i.e., how to mount them, how they can fail in a fight, what sort of power to expect (along with amp draw and so suitable ESCs), how to swap the gears if need be, etc. As I wrote in the video, let me know and I'll do it. :)

Thanks for watching.

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Hi there so I was just taking apart. One of these cheap drills, as I have done several times now to prepare it for use in a combat robot and I was thinking that a couple of years ago, I could really use a video like this to show me the do's and don'ts and risks, and just in general, a bit of a helping hand when it comes to taking one of these things apart.

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So I'm going to start off by just taking the one screw that I've left in here out, I've already taken this one apart, I reassemble dit loosely the sake of the video get this screw out. You can see what the innards look like battery terminals, the switch business you can just pull out. It occurs to some people to use these things, because you know that's a proportional control and you know you might get to do something with a servo to get your speed.

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Control affect that you're going to want eventually new robot I, wouldn't recommend that more things to go wrong for what it's worth, you're better off, getting a if you like, legitimate speed, controller, pull this whole unit out there. We go that aside and that's effectively your unit. Now there are certain parts that we don't want. We don't want the clutch slash talk system, it's in this and really off. In most cases at least we don't want the Chuck so to start off or take the battery out of the way into them.

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Leave the batteries in these things, they're cheap NiCad cells, normally ranging from 1 to 1.3 amp hours, they're, alright, I. Finally, struggle on how much power they can put out that those can be used. You might be better off looking into some cheap, as I say, cheap and I may choose from someone like component shop or getting some lithium polymer batteries for no weight at all in incredible power. So moving on, we've got our drill here now. The next step for taking this apart is to take the Chuck off and on all these drills.

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That certainly I've come across and I don't see why I need you would be different. Is they have a reverse screw thread in there I'm sure not to get this on the camera, and that's quite fiddly, but you just take the screwdriver. Stick it in there I've already loosened this one and you've got a twist, it obviously in the direction you wouldn't expect to come out. Now there you go.

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This is very important. Keep that because you'll be reusing it at least you're likely to be, and if not, it's just a really handy thing to have so. Keep that safe.

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Stick that in the battery box, not the battery box and the Chuck should twist off in a normal direction as you'd expect it to again unlikely you'll, use it but worth keeping, because it's a nice nice little thing- and you know, if you're, using a setup where you've got a threaded rod for a lift or something like that, keeping the druk can be handy so keep that next step is to remove the clutch.

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Slash talked change your thing or, what's it and you can see, there are two little screws that I don't have other cameras, picking those up there and here so you want to loosen those off now. At this point you want to start getting careful because a high NT and I'm already fighting in my hand, there's quite a powerful spring nice big washer style thing that can be used for some marketing in that the camera that can be used for mounting the drills in some way.

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But again, if not just a handy thing to have it to the box next thing to climb off is this unit. You can see the spring in there again. I keep these things this less. So this is very specific part to these drills. So but anyway, it stick it in the box. Now this bit is quite fiddly, so I'm going to bring it forward and underneath here, as you can see, there are ball bearings loose in these these little holes and if I turn upside down, they'll go crazy, go everywhere.

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Don't turn the shaft at this point, because if you do they'll go everywhere as we learn when we were taking our first one of these apart quite some time ago now so just carefully tip those into the box.

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They do take sometimes a bit of a there. You go think, that's all of them. Yeah, that's one of them! There's one more stage to make this usable for a combat robot. You need to lock off this clutch system. So you see I shouldn't be able to turn that due to the gearbox that should be really tight.

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So what most people do and I think it's as good a way as any is to put set screws or grub screws in these hulls again, I'm, not sure how well the cameras, picking those up these holes all the way around here, they're m5 size. We bought some m5 five millimeter long grub screws and we found that they weren't actually quite long enough. They work, but they'll be better off as long as we've got actually order to make mill.

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Don't think the camera will pick it up, but in there in here there's kind of a plate and it has not quite teeth, but it has effectively pointy bits and the ball bearings what they do. Is they push down onto that? The intention is to stop it from spinning. There are two ways you can go all the way, so this can't move at all. It will move when you drive the motor, but this can't move, there's no free play or you can come back a bit and there'll be a bit of a side-to-side.

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That's preference I prefer to tighten all the way down. So there's no play in this because it just makes the response from the drill when you hit the throttle a bit more immediate in that there's, no no catch-up time in the gearbox to do this to make up that extra centimetre, a twist I just find it makes the Drive a bit more precise. Obviously, this one's got a black case. A beige kind of colour case like this is quite common.

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Lots of them have four screws here around the outside doesn't really make any difference these cheap drills when they always use this size mode, which is a 550 size motor. This one is a 12, volt rail and get more expensive style, 550 cans which I've got bigger, fan, blades and just a bit better quality, but I find these work quite well as long as you treat them well, so that's more or less you drill unit once you've got the grub screws in you're ready to go. There's one more step in that.

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If you're going to be using this in a kind of a high power situation, perhaps if you're going to be over vaulting the motors for a bit of extra power- or you know that you're not going to be soft on throttle, the first stage of gears in these are often plastic and it's worth checking, because if they are, it's quite a real possibility that when you gun the throttle that they'll shred, which is it's not a problem in a drill situation. But in a combat situation, it's win or lose.

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We lost all of our gearboxes, actually that we didn't modify in the first tormentor robot. So, of course, for the second one, we've learnt a lesson with making them all metal. As for finding more metal gears, I'm sure there are places on the Internet we've just acquired, so many drills over the time that we now have enough metal gears to do it. The second stage is always metal.

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First stage sometimes is, but if it isn't will be plastic and you want to replace it with metal ones, they're always going to be the same size for this scale, drill other than that this is getting too long. My Internet's too slow to be able to upload anything very long. So there's you drill, happy combat, robot II. If that's a verb.

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