My team would like to build an elevator lift for Ringmaster. We’ve never even seen one in person. Where can we start to learn how to put one together? I can’t find clear instructions on youTube.
Thank you!
If you mean like rack-and-pinion, see Welcome to Robolink | STEM and coding with robotics kits
I’m not sure the rack and pinion is the right answer. We want to get up to a great height with great speed for dropping rings onto the Ringmaster posts. Probably a chain lift of some kind. We just can’t find directions anywhere for building one. Does VEX have instructions for building mechanisms like this?
I don’t think there are many detailed IQ designs published, but you can check the vexiq curriculum, for example:
https://www.vexrobotics.com/vexiq/education/iq-curriculum/mechanisms/lifting-mechanisms
Given VEX IQ’s limited “design vocabulary”, the students don’t really need a detailed blueprint to build an idea though.
You can look for published VRC robots and replicate/simplify the ideas from IQ parts.
But you need to figure out what are your requirements on the mechanism, in reasonable technical terms - from what you posted, it would be:
- move fast (how fast?)
- reach high enough to drop rings on posts (which posts, the short ones or the long one too?)
What I don’t see specified is:
- it should fit into 15" legal starting height
- whether you require linear up-down motion (it that what you call an “elevator”?) or whether it suffices if the manipulator keeps the orientation while changing height. Or if you don’t even care for that at all.
There is a great overview of IQ-built lifting mechanisms at:
You can also research a scissor lift, like: - YouTube
We tried the chain lift and we needed all 15 inches for it to lift the height of the post. Now ours had to be connected at two different points which made the lift to be higher.