Our prototype elevator lift was working great. However our robot was 1/2 inch too tall, and 1/2 inch too long. So we cut 1/2 inch from the top and shortened our spacing between our elevator stages from 1 inch to 3/4 inch.
We didn’t have any binding issues going up or down. However now the arm is pitched forward and will not come back down after we lift it.
If we hold back on the third stage then everything works great. A couple of ideas we had to correct this was to add a roller at the bottom of each slide, so that the spacing can be constant as the lift moves up and down, and the other idea we had was to attach rubber bands to the tops of each lift section.
Does anyone have any thoughts or do we have a big design flaw?
Your chain seems very loose which may be causing the problem. Try removing a few links or adding in an idler. Also, if by pitched forward, you mean it leans, then you might try reducing the space between each stage. Typically the less distance between each stage, the less lean.
Tightening your chain will definitely help with the skipping. Also, you may want to brace your tower and keep it straight. We had a similar problem and that’s how we fixed it.
We had the exact same problem. Basicly there’s a few simple changes that you can make to try to fix the problem and a few drastic ones. One fix is try tilting the whole tower and everything back slightly by losening the bolts on the tower and pulling your support bars back a hole and re-tighten or as many holes as you need to to give the whole lift a slight angle. This was one of the first things that we tried, it didn’t solve the problem but it helped. The next thing that we did was turn the linear slides 90 degrees. This was a huge improvement but still the lift wasn’t doing exactly what we wanted. The final and most drastic fix that you can do is rather that having a continuous linear lift make it a cascading linear lift. Most of you lift will stay the same but the way the chain moves the lift is a little different. Making our lift cascading solved the problem. Here are a few links that should get you headed in the right direction for building your cascading linear lift.
Another thing I noticed is that I didn’t see any elastics on your lift, adding some will probably greatly help you lift raise up game objects. Maybe you do have elastics but I just couldn’t see them in the video.