After testing a bunch of intakes, I’ve wondered, which is the best one. I’ve found an intake similar to 2Z’s to be quite effective, but out of curiosity, what do you guys think the best intake is?
For our intake we found that the best is a top roller because it is very fluid when picking up balls. Also, when we are piking up balls the drivers do not have to be very accurate as you would with side rollers.
i personally like top rollers more because of their simplicity and easiness to collect a ball but it’s harder to feed into the flywheel correctly… So I’m going to try 2 corkscrew top rollers that can position the ball left and right then let the ball go into the flywheel that Is shaped like "0) " has anyone else tried to do this?
pls explain b/c you lost me
It’s like a chip auger in a CNC machine, or so I assume
I’d assume @OverlyOptimisticProgramer would use 2 of these to have the balls rise to the top of his intake.
I hope this clears it up. 
I like the rubberband top roller intake but I am worried people on other teams at my school would plot against me (cough cough @Tylennis) and try and get the rubber bands caught on their robot. Is there anything that you guys have found that reduces the risk?
Drive better
Lol thats our plan for our rubber band intake. Top rollers though, type based on other design factors of the robot
it does thx
Wow @ThunderRobotics I would never do such a thing against my own sister teams. Never have I ever intentionally screwed over my sister teams
I’ve never tried the intake, but maybe you should wrap the rubberbands around standoffs. Then try connecting the standoffs to sprockets or gears using rubber links
Our team is going with a rubber band intake, but like @ThunderRobotics, I’m worried that it’ll get caught if we try to play defense. Or our driver has to learn to shoot with the front and play defense with the back.
Yeah I thought this would happen picture a robot “U” chassis the vertical single flywheel is in the back of the robot or bottom of the “U” the flywheel picks balls off the ground and throws them. The intake I was talking about would be at the top of the “U”. It would be 2 horizontal axels each with its own motor. The axels would be about 3ish inches apart (I’m guessing here) and a few inches high. On the first axel is worm wheels all the way across but The right side is mirror the left side. The second axel is the same but in the middle is a small space where there is no worm wheel. The whole purpose is to move the balls in the far right or left laterally to the center then into the flywheel. If someone can explain this better please do.
in a match our rubber band intake got cought on the other team’s robot, it wasnt a big deal though since the rubber bands that got stuck just snapped off and we could continue, there were enough left to intake normally
We had a different experience with that. We went up against a team with an elastic intake, and they crashed into us. Their elastics all got caught in our tank tread intake. We both tried to pull away, but we didn’t want to break any rules. So we just stayed there for the last minute of the match. I don’t know what we would have done if we weren’t way ahead in the match already. Would it have been considered entanglement and damaging of the opposing robot if we had ripped off their intake, and would we have been disqualified?
I’ve gone through 6 different intake so far, and my favourite as of right now is the rubber band intake using the large sprockets.
I started with side rollers
Which transferred the balls to the double flywheel nicely:
Unfortunately it didn’t pick up balls very well. So I built this:
It was much better at picking up balls, but it was still somewhat difficult to pick aim at the balls with. (I was chasing balls across the court.) Our third intake was of a similar design:
But it couldn’t be made to work with a turret. (And it had the aiming issue as well)
So I built this:
It was pretty good, but not amazing, it was necessary on our past two robots to have the chain running behind the intake, so it was impossible to built a good rubber band intake.
I built this to comply with the chain issue:
It worked beautifully, but the unfortunate thing with intake flaps is that they generate a lot of friction. So I have now built a rubber band intake with a side chain connection to the rest of the intake. I don’t have any pictures of that yet.
Sorry if this clogs the thread, but I like pictures.
I think that those kinds of robots should not pass inspection since that is a pretty big risk of entanglement. I am sure that if I had a rubber band intake like that and I wanted to get entangled with someone I easily could, which should be reason for a design like that to be illegal.
The risk of entanglement for this game is actually pretty low compared to previous games, even with a rubber band intake, most robots have nothing moving or sticking out besides the intake wheras in skyrise and tossup you had intakes that would stick out a ton and lifts that also complicate it more, in sack attack there was a ton of defense going on and atleast 1/3 of all matches i played had some sort of entanglement
It seems to be an almost general consensus that the rubber band intakes are the best, specifically as they can be made to be really wide, thus allowing for easy ball harvesting.
I agree that it’s probably the best, but I really like Ironwave 26’s intake from a few months ago (I don’t know if they’re still using the same one).
