I was thinking something similar, we have a little piece of bar on the intakes that is hooked in a hole or something, dislodges when we spin the intakes. We used to have non-flip out intakes, but we found out in our first tournament that they are too short, and often will push the ball back instead of pulling it in. We think that having slightly longer intakes (which we can only get through having them flip out, as they are barely in the 18"-the only way we passed inspection was because we had a nice judge) will help pull them in better.
Here is my (kind of bad) paint render of my idea. This will only work it we use a something like what we have now, which is 2 gears screwed on top of each other with a generous amount of anti-slip mat and rubber bands wrapped around them. We could use Tread, too, and just use a stand off instead of the bar, maybe.
yes something like that could certainly do the trick.
Hey any chance you can explain how the hood pops up to the propper place every time? Trying to build a hoodbot and can’t figure out how to stop it from going too far
I just have a hard stop on the back of the hood that keeps it from going up too far. you can pretty much use anything, I used a few standoffs screwed onto the hinge, but really anything works.
For my first design, I had an extremely janky hood stop, where I made a chain out of zip ties, and connected them to the hood and the bot. It acted as a string that would stop the hood from going out too far. I would really not suggest this. What I have now is kinda like what Xenon said.