Hello,
Our team has been working on an intake for a while now, but when we go to intake the ring, the ring doesn’t go up the intake, and just bangs against the edge of the bottom of the cardboard. The cardboard is just a stand-in for polycarbonate that we will put in after we are sure it works. I have linked pictures of our intake design from a lot of angles. Can you help with this?
I don’t see anything that would prevent the intake from working. However, try replacing the cardboard for polycarb or metal. Both of these have less friction than cardboard. Cardboard isn’t legal anyways, so you will have to eventually replace it. Another idea is to bend the bottom of the ramp so that there is a smooth path for the disk to follow, rather than the steep angle that currently exists.
I assume you know this but cardboard isn’t legal for vrc. But I would try moving the front set of wheels up.
Does the bottom part of your intake pivot? If not, then thats probably the problem as there wont be enough space for the disc to adapt to the change in elevation when it gets picked up.
I’m not completely sure what you mean when you say pivot. Also, the disc never changes in elevation. It doesn’t get picked up to begin with. I will try to send a video sometime tomorrow showing it.
Try adding more rubber bands to the intake or moving the holder further down the intake.
Add a lip to the bottom of the intake that is ~45* less steep than your backplate, this should fix it.
Agreed, that intake is extremely steep. Try making a less steep intake, or an intake which starts not so steep then curves steeper, or, like rohit.s said, a part leading to that intake which is less steep
You should make it so the bottom of it is “floating”. This will allow it to pick up the disc easier.
It is floating. There’s a screw joint on the hole above the axle for the second stage of the intake. (Also happy birthday! 
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What speed is the intake going at?
600 rpm the small wheels are sprocketed up to 1800 rpm because we had no 12t sprockets.
speed checks out. it may be too fast, add some torque or smth…?
You need to use metal. Polycarbonate and cardboard have large amounts of friction. Make sure your motor has enough torque. You can test it by putting through the top. These are problems my team ran into.
I would argue and say to use polycarbonate or something similar. Our team used HDPE and it worked great. We found metal plates has too much friction and discs tend to get caught on the little holes.
Just saying 1800 rpm is really fast for an intake. Most teams use 600,360, or 200 rpm.
Yeah. We normally would have the small wheels running at 900 rpm so they could all be at the same linear speed, but we ran out of 12t sprockets. The 3 in wheels are running at 600 rpm though
Yeah, but it’s not apples to apples.
cardboard vs plastic
intake wheel rpm is almost certainly different
placement/dimensions is almost certainly different
I recommend taking a 600 rpm motor, connecting to a shaft w/ intake rollers, holding this over a piece of plastic, and moving forward/backward/up/down/etc until you find the right ‘spot’ by hand. Then build the intake to these dimensions.
Also, would recommend redoing wheel/motor bearings so the shaft goes through the middle hole.
And, as said, the intake shaft #1 is probably turning WAY too fast.
Ideally, the rpm x wheel diameter should be equal for all intake shafts to avoid a disc touching two wheels (on different shafts) that are turning at different tangential speeds.
By pivot they mean that of the first row of the intake wheels are free to rotate along a horizontal axis a little inner and maybe above and within the drivetrain; In your case, the rollers apply pressure on the discs and take it where the cardboard (future polycarbonate) is, but when dragged in, the disk gets stuck and sandwiched between the wheels from one point from above and one point from below by the cardboard. Letting the first row of flex wheels free to change elevation or let pivot, therefore move up and down, will let the wheels bounce when the disk meets the polycarbonate and make space for the disk to get in, the wheels will have contact with the disk again after they adjust height.
