Thursday, November 03, 2005

Gears, Gear Trains 11-3-05


Gears can be confusing! Today in class we had a great experience discussing,predicting, observing and making conclusions about the simplest of gear ideas.

We found out that when a 40 tooth gear turns for one revolution that the 8 tooth gear will turn 5 times. We then used that idea of gear ratio to discuss bicycle gears in relation to speed, effort, and power. We'll discuss some other concepts like torque in the near future.

What a day! I think several students were not very clear about how the ratios work. Now I think we made progress. We will do more demonstrations with gears and wheel size. The demonstration with the two robots with identical gears going different speeds due to different wheel size was an eye-opener too!

Any thoughts about todays demonstrations or ideas for further discussion?
How about just telling me one simple thing you learned today?
I would like a comment from every student.

BUILD ROBOTS THAT YOU CONTROL WITH GEAR TRAINS!

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that the lesson on gears was very helpful. I think this because it helped me understand what would make our robot better and how to improve our skills.

-Gabrielle-

Unknown said...

I think that I will try to incorparate some of the things you taught us when we build robots in the future

Anonymous said...

Yesterday in Lego Robotics class I learned that all lego gears have amounts of teeth that are multiples of eight. I think that this helps a lot when we want to see what ratio we want our gear train to have. Gears can be used to either slow down and power up your robot or speed it up ut decrease the power.

wilson729 said...

I made a gear train yesterday. Go check out my website @ think.com

Anonymous said...

This lesson on gears made me understand way better. Now I could do my robot using the right gears to go the right amount of speed.

Fred Wright said...

Can you tell me one little idea that sticks in your brain about how the gears ratios work?

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

Today in class mr.Wright taught a lesson on gears. He showed us
how to incorporarte gears into our robots. Our group was having problems with gears but no more thanks to mr.Wright. We use ratios to gear up or gear down

Anonymous said...

im still confused beacause it its a little to much atone point but ur a good teacher

Anonymous said...

its powring down becuase 42 teeth gear cant go around the th tooth gear.Titans plus a girl

Anonymous said...

Mr. Wright taught us about adding gears and creating gear chains on our robots. He told us that lego gears had multiples of eight for the amounts of teeth on them. This can help greatly becuse it is easier to create ratios stating the relationship of the number of spins of the gearswhen we create gear trains. If you put a sixteen-tooth onto the motor and connect it to an eight-tooth gear with an axel and wheels attached to it the wheels will turn twice for every one time the motor spins once. That example sped up the robot but if you switched the two gears around the wheels would turn once for everytime the motor spins twice. In these examples the ratios of the spins of the motor-gear to the wheel-gears where 1:2 in the faster gear chain and 2:1 on the slower gear train. When a robot moves slower it has more strength but if it moves faster it has less strength. Also, the size of the wheels that you use afects speed. A larger wheel will travel faster than a smaller wheel so you can use gears to alter this slightly or greatly. Make sure that you do not make your robot too fast or it will be so weak it will tear itself apart near the motors but if it's too slow it isn't so reliable either.

Anonymous said...

Lego Robotics is getting a little difficult. That's great I can finally test my mind.

Anonymous said...

I think that the lesson on gear trains was challenging. At the same time I found it very interesting.