Hey, you should join Hack Club! I was just at an event where a high schooler designed and built a continuous variable transmission (https://outpost.hackclub.com).
You’ll meet a ton of interesting, friendly teens who are all helping each other build awesome projects.
Cool project!
(Hack Club is a nonprofit and I’m the founder of it)
As a teenager that spent some time somewhat around Hack Club things, I felt that being a part of Hack Club pressured me to live live faster than I was ready to (like 16 year olds doing summer internships / cohabiting with their partners). I want to say a lot of the people I knew online on Hack Club Slack went to places like MIT, so I guess there's that, but there is some beauty in taking life more slowly. I also didn't want to be boxed into running my school's club with what Hack Club provided. I think they do good things (eg. Hack Club Bank helps students run events before they can financially) and I interacted with a lot of really cool people. But if it is anything like the past, I wanted to share this.
This is great — there's something about solo builders documenting their actual process (including the parts that didn't work) that's more useful than most polished writeups. Nice work.
What is it? Is this like a gear, where the output shaft turns at some fraction of the input shaft? Is better or worse than traditional toothed gears in some way?
It acts like a gearbox, allowing you to sacrifice rotational speed for higher torque output. What makes this gearbox type special is their low backlash, multiple points of contact, and high efficiency.
They're pretty cool. They can be good in situations where you don't want any backlash and lots of torque. I believe they're very popular as actuators in robotics.