Chainsaw Intakes

[Owen]

Hello, I am interested to see how many teams are using the elongated side rollers, also called chainsaw intakes that I originally revealed in this thread. I am also interested to see if you got the idea from us or came up with it yourself. And finally, respond with any experiences you have had with this intake type and your opinion of it. Thanks!

[Thorondor]

Since we can't choose more than one option, we do not use chainsaw, but we came up with it ourselves and used it at our first competition. We then tested the side-rollers and found that it worked better for us.

[RampantFang]

We had issues perfecting our single sprocket driven rollers, specifically, in the case of picking up tilted barrels. After some thinking, we came up with elongated "chainsaw" intakes because they are better for picking up things from corners and allow us to pick up sideways barrels. They also give more room for objects within the feed, and give strictly linear motion, as opposed to tangential motion.

We're enjoying the benefits of chainsaw intakes and I'm glad, though not surprised, other teams have come up with the idea too.

[FirePhoenix]

We had a regular 2 roller intake, but when banditoffernando said that you guys could cap goals at will, I couldn't resist. Plus it fit well with the new design of our robot. WASABI having one too also encouraged me to join the bandwagon. Hope you won't get mad at us for using it.

[Jij]

I myself don't use the "chainsaw intakes", as we don't seem to have any problems with our single sprocket intakes. If they are tweaked right, they shouldn't cause problems. I would definitely be using "chainsaw intakes", except I worry the "chainsaw" could break or snap off. And btw, there is a team in New Zealand that were using them a long time ago, and this team used them at the Robot World Cup

~George

[SweetMochi]

1492X used the chainsaw intakes at our latest tournament with greater benefit in the skills challenge than in the actual tournament. My operator and myself found throughout the tournament that we preferred the round intakes for actual matches because they are less bulky than the chainsaw intakes and far easier to aim with. However, we found the chainsaw intakes very useful for our programming skills because it gave us another object of capacity that helped with our route. We plan to revert back to round intakes for worlds and will redesign our robot slightly to maintain our programming skills capabilities. Finally, while we did come up with the chainsaw intake concept at the beginning of the year, 4886A's videos did provide inspiration for new benefits that we saw to the design, so thank you for your videos

[Owen]

Originally Posted by Thorondor

Since we can't choose more than one option, we do not use chainsaw, but we came up with it ourselves and used it at our first competition. We then tested the side-rollers and found that it worked better for us.

I am interested in hearing why you didn't like the chainsaw intakes.

Originally Posted by FirePhoenix

We had a regular 2 roller intake, but when banditoffernando said that you guys could cap goals at will, I couldn't resist. Plus it fit well with the new design of our robot. WASABI having one too also encouraged me to join the bandwagon. Hope you won't get mad at us for using it.

I'm not mad, in fact I am somewhat happy that our design ideas are inspiring other teams, especially world champs like WASABI.

Originally Posted by Jij

I myself don't use the "chainsaw intakes", as we don't seem to have any problems with our single sprocket intakes. If they are tweaked right, they shouldn't cause problems. I would definitely be using "chainsaw intakes", except I worry the "chainsaw" could break or snap off. And btw, there is a team in New Zealand that were using them a long time ago, and this team used them at the Robot World Cup

~George

I don't see why they are any more likely to snap off than anything else. I am aware that other teams were using them first, but my team did design them independently and posted a reveal on the forums. Re-watching the world cup videos I now see that robot.

[SweetMochi]

Originally Posted by Owen

I don't see why they are any more likely to snap off than anything else. I am aware that other teams were using them first, but my team did design them independently and posted a reveal on the forums. Re-watching the world cup videos I now see that robot.

They are more likely to snap off because the chain actually spans across open space since the whole intake uses 2 sprockets instead of only 1. With the round "normal" side roller intakes, all of the chain is directly touching the sprocket and it would be very hard to provide force at the correct angle and correct magnitude to snap them off. However, if you provide some force directly on to the chainsaw intakes, they are liable to snap at the points where the intake spans across open space between the sprockets.

[Owen]

Originally Posted by SweetMochi

My operator and myself found throughout the tournament that we preferred the round intakes for actual matches because they are less bulky than the chainsaw intakes and far easier to aim with.

Yes, they are slightly harder to aim sometimes, but for ours it's not much of a difference (but I've seen that yours are longer than ours). Hope you get a design that works for you.

Originally Posted by SweetMochi

They are more likely to snap off because the chain actually spans across open space since the whole intake uses 2 sprockets instead of only 1. With the round "normal" side roller intakes, all of the chain is directly touching the sprocket and it would be very hard to provide force at the correct angle and correct magnitude to snap them off. However, if you provide some force directly on to the chainsaw intakes, they are liable to snap at the points where the intake spans across open space between the sprockets.

Oh I see now. We have never had them snap, and it would take quite a lot of force in just the right place to do that. I don't think that the motors themselves can supply enough force to snap the chain.

[SweetMochi]

Originally Posted by Owen

Yes, they are slightly harder to aim sometimes, but for ours it's not much of a difference (but I've seen that yours are longer than ours). Hope you get a design that works for you.

Thanks! Mostly we didn't like the slower outtake speed of the longer intakes compared to the more explosive power of the round intakes.

Oh I see now. We have never had them snap, and it would take quite a lot of force in just the right place to do that. I don't think that the motors themselves can supply enough force to snap the chain.[/quote]

We had problems in practice with the chainsaw intakes snapping because we have locks on our intakes that prevent them from flipping back up, but during competition we were able to avoid any snapping mishaps. If you don't have a locking mechanism, then snapping is probably easier to avoid since the intakes just tilt a bit and deflect the force.