Banebots Gearbox Question

Hello Jay,

Since your project has unfortunately "come to a stall", I was hoping that you would be willing to share what ratio gearbox you were testing? I have a yoke that I am working on and think I can successfully adapt the gearbox design to my setup but would like to have a gear ratio to start my own testing with, rather than just a shot in the dark.

Thank you,
Joe

So after using Photoshop to measure some things in the teaser picture I have come to the following educated guesses regarding the parts shown:

Banebots P61 gearbox (for the RS-500 motors) in 3:1, 4:1, or 5:1 ratio
The belt is 3mm pitch x 16mm width (width specified in video)
The pulleys for the roll axis appear to be 20 teeth on the smaller one and 72 teeth on the larger one
The pulleys for the pitch axis appear to be 40 or 42 teeth

Hopefully Jay is still glancing at the forum every now and then and can provide the definitive answer on the gear ratio he was testing and how it was working.  I think I may take a chance on the 4:1 ratio and see how it goes.

Seems like Jay hasn't been here for a while. Which is really too bad considering he made some amazing progress. But I guess when life calls, it calls.

Anyhow, do you know if you can backdrive those Banebots gearboxes? I was under the impression that most gearboxes are damaged if they are forced in reverse from the output shaft.

flyallthings wrote: Anyhow, do you know if you can backdrive those Banebots gearboxes? I was under the impression that most gearboxes are damaged if they are forced in reverse from the output shaft.

By backdrive I am assuming that you are referring to me moving the yoke and thus spinning the motor? If that is correct, they are single stage planetary gear boxes with straight cut gears and don't really care which shaft drives them. The only thing that could potentially be an issue would be if the "combined" forces of me pushing one way and the motor pushing the other would be too high for the gearbox internals (e.g. broken gears). The case of the gearbox is aluminum but all the parts inside are steel, with my low 4:1 reduction I don't think there will be enough force on any of them to cause damage. I took the sidewinder joystick apart to measure the motors so I could order the correct adapter plate and noticed that all of the gears inside are plastic. The joystick has a much higher reduction to go from the motor turning multiple times vs. the stick moving maybe 90 degrees full forward to full backward and they don't appear to have any damage to them. I'm not worried about the gearboxes at all, when they came I took them apart to see what they look like and I can say that I am very impressed with the quality of Banebots' product. Given their relative low cost and small size I was not expecting to see something of this high quality. I will be starting a thread related to my build soon and will provide plenty of pictures and information as I progress.

Joe

Sounds great! I'm working on a cyclic for my helicopter sim. The cyclic stick is approx 16" long, so that's a lot of leverage needed to simulate artificial spring return. I was planning on using DC motors connected to a pulley, but if I could put a planetary gearbox in between the dc motor and pulley then I think I could get a fair amount of torque.

This guy has a great YouTube video for guys like me who are pretty bad with engineering things. https://youtu.be/pqaR711Pw6o

His setup with the gear reduction going into a belt driven reduction seems like it would be perfect for a cyclic. The only hard part it seems to me would be the size in order to fit everything together and make it work with a gimbal. I wish you the best of luck with your project and if I can be of any help just let me know.

Thanks a lot. I probably will need some input at some point. I've spent a few years teaching myself what I need to know to pull all this off. Feels a bit daunting. I'm just glad I picked up a 3D printer so I can do a lot of trial and error.