Harmonic vs Cycloidal Drive - Torque, Backlash and Wear Test

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You should throw a planetary gearbox in there as well and use it as a baseline.

I tried to 3d print small S springs in PLA for a circuit probe and found the PLA would brittle fracture if left under strain over night, and otherwise lose flexibility eventually. I switched to PETG and have yet to break the S springs. Might give PETG a try for the flex spline. It's more sticky than molten PLA, but doesn't require a heated enclosure like ABS. Excellent video presentation. Bravo.

That outcome really shocked me, in terms of durability over time. When I first saw them both in operation, the cycloidal looked like it had more flex and strain on some parts. But thank you, I’m not sure why this showed up in my feed, but it did and I learned something!

Now that you have created wonderful 3d printed prototypes to prove the concept, I'd love to see this taken to the next stage, and produce metal parts, either from CNC parts, or maybe testing out parts made from metal 3d printers. Great work on all this.

Dude you're killing it. I need to work with you or for you. I love the delivery and competence and clarity. Nice walk through the progress of logical thought. Ontop of the work you kindly made a video. Thank-you

For the Australian Rover Challenge I used a flexspline that was printed in solid TPU of 95A Shore hardness and it performed really well. This choice was landed on after a significant amount of testing.

Very impressive. It takes a lot of engineering education, training, experience and testing testing testing. Thank you.

Hats off to you! That was a heck of a lot of work by the looks of it and a very thorough look into this topic. Well done! I've increased my understanding as well.

For the flex spline, it is something that need to flex, so I would definitely go with TPU or Nylon, PLA is nice for prototyping and part that needs strength but not for flexibility. Anyway this is a really interesting test, I'd love to see it with a different material for the flex spline.

The amount of deep work to achieve this result is crazy respect

I’ll have to go watch that Cycloidal drive video after this one - I used to work in a factory that made cycloidal drive three phase motors, and I always wondered what was so special about the cycloidal drive

Nice, and greetings from Germany. Best for 2023 :)

I think that you can increase the durability of the flex spline if you add a radius of 2 or 3 mm in the bottom of the cup around the wall.

Been a subscriber for a long time. Your stuff gets more and more technically sophisticated. 👍👍

Wow, great video! One of the best dyi on this topic. Really awesome job! Thanks for sharing your experiences and very interesting comparative approach.

Thank you very much for this great video. Little Tipp: You could try to shrink the length of the teeth on the harmonic drive, so you don't need to stretch the material that much. Also it might be a good idea, to use 1 bigger bearing instead of 3 (or one) smaller ones, to stretch the pressure / load.

Excellent video. Thank you for doing these.

Excellent work and great presentation!

Hey all, just FYI, the equation as copied and pasted into SW had some issues. I copy and pasted it directly into SW2022 and it came up with something that looked more like a flower than a gear. After watching a video on Stepbystep-robotics channel I was able to figure it out. He had done some intermediate calcs on a couple of the terms and then replaced those terms in the equation and removed the associated parentheses that are no longer needed. This solved the problem. Also, in SW you can use the equation editor to lay out your terms and then put the equation into the sketch using the terms with, with " around each term. This makes your disk editable without having to re-copy/paste the equation in.