Gears and gear boxes

Miniaturization opens-up a wide set of applications, but many interesting mechanisms are difficult to miniaturize due to to the difficulty in getting adequate parts. Small pager motors are available, but gears, axles, encoders are difficult to get. At LAMI-EPFL, we developed in 1995-99, thanks to the expertise of André Guignard, small robots down to 1 cubic centimeter around specially cut gears.

DIDEL sells a proprietary set of Module 0.3 gears (G3xx family), that still can be implemented with easily available precision machines: distances between the axle must be met with a precision of 0.02 mm.

G3xx gears - see also Microgears.pdf (Mod 0.3 and 0.2)

The G3xx gear family consists of a 12-teeth pinion, and gears with 36, 48 and 60 teeth molded in POM material.This allows for the following reduction ratios:
Pinion and one gear: 1:3 1:4 1:5
Pinion and two gears: 1:9 1:12 1:15 1:16 1:20 1:25
etc.
Gear sizes for the M360L (60 teeth light) are given next. The important parameter is the nominal diameter, equal to the module multiplied by the teeth number.

RMB will be pleased to provide ball bearings down to 3mm in diameter. André Guignard build at LAMI-EPFL a nice mechanism with ten 3mm bearings to move the wings of a Morpho butterfly (3mm smoovy motor from RMB).

DIDEL built another flapping wing Morpho butterfly using its Nanobird magnetic actuators. See the video (1.8 Mega)