I see, thanks for clarification.
how do you manage the air supply on the pneumatic clamp? I would imagine 2 double acting pistons eat up the air supply pretty quickly, so is the clamp hooked up to both air tanks? I don’t have much pneumatics experience so I’m not sure what the best route for saving air in this kind of situation would be
we have enough air to easily last a full match, so air management hasn’t been an issue for us. We do use both air tanks.
if you wanted to save air on an application like this, having air power the clamping of the mechanism, but a rubber band power the releasing could save almost half the air used, since it takes a lot of force to clamp but nearly none to release. You could also get away with using a single cylinder instead of two like we are, we only use two as a way to power the clamp from the sides rather than the top, to provide clearance for scoring rings.
Hello. I’m back again with another question. For robot parts, do they have to be VEX certified? Or can I use other parts to build it? Because right now I’m trying to do a makeshift claw, but the gears that I have access to are not adequate for what I’m trying to do. There are gears out there, though that are made for 90 degree turns. I’m not sure if I’m explaining what I’m trying to do that well, sorry about that.
Any question that asks “can we” or “are we allowed” can be answered by consulting the game manual:
R6, R7, and R8 are the relevant rules to your question.
(and there are 90-degree bevel gears as part of the V5 product line 
)
We are working towards something quite similar, but are still very inexperienced. This bot impresses us… Just a quick question, you think one motor will be enough to power an effective lift similar to this?
Almost certainly. With good build quality and some banding, you should be able to get away with 100 1:5 for a smaller lift, and 100 1:7 if you have a larger lift or just want to stay safe.
one motor can power a lift, however if your lift has long arms (like mine does) it will require more torque to raise it compared to a lift with shorter arms, so a 1:7 ratio on 100 rpm is probably the safe choice here. Keep in mind rubber bands will also be important to counter the relatively heavy weight of the clamp (normal clamps can weigh very little, but the bulky one I’ve used to clamp and tilt goals weighs quite a lot)
Thanks, this helps.
20 char
can you show a picture of your motor mounting? ive been wanting to put motore over/ behind wheels but cant seem to fit them and properly support the axle
mounting for which system?
sounds silly but how they mount to the drivetrain. How did you get them above the wheels?
they’re not above the wheels, I simply bolted them to the drive as usual.
ooh now i see, drive motors are in the middle and geared to the wheels.
Sorry if this is a little late, but I’ve currently began to think about redesigning my claw, as it isn’t the most effective. Yours seems to be quite effective, as I’ve seen in your matches that it can lift goals with ease.
Though, I’m slightly confused as to how you lift the goals, as I could only see a clamp-like mechanism that would grab the goal from the top.
Could you give me a brief breakdown of it real quick? It would be much appreciated.
Thanks
The way we handle goals is split into 3 mechanisms, the clamp, the tilter, and the lift.
The clamp simply uses pneumatics to pull down a pivoting bar with some standoffs mounted to a hinge, in order to latch inside the cup of the goal, as is pretty standard with goal clamps.
Then this entire clamping assembly is attached on a pivot to the tilter, so that we can tilt alliance goals into the robot for ring scoring. This is only to score rings on alliance goals though, and has no purpose if you only plan on lifting goals. But if that’s the case, you may as well use a more standard top down cylinder mount, the reason we make the cylinders straddle the clamp was to give it clearance to tilt and for rings to drop onto it.
And then to lift, the whole thing is just on a 4 bar, pretty simple.
I will say I don’t recommend using this type of clamp for anything other than grabbing alliance goals to score rings on. The amount of tolerance the clamp has isn’t very forgiving, and while it really does latch on to the goals very well once it has them, grabbing them initially is harder than with a bigger, more reaching latch.
I like that “VEX drone” comes up there before “VEX robotics”
hello xenon i am a big fan of this robot you built can I either have a C.A.D. or a step by step build instruction so I can see it for my worlds rebuild. please remove all the colored screws from the C.A.D or instructions because they look gross. i am building a way better robot compared to this but i just want to take a look
Here you go:
Build instructions