I am starting this thread for my own students to add to. However it’s open to anyone. I realize there are other threads out there but I am looking for a place for my students to contribute to the forum and learn the forum platform .
So… Mazama Robotics Students - don’t forget to post a picture of your lift. Explain it’s pro’s and cons. When you are done take a screen shot of your post and print it to include in your End of Challenge paperwork.
For the Mount Everest Challenge, my robot did not work as planned. It was a good design, but the motors could not handle it. We had a claw that put the bean bag on the lift. Then the lift would raise the bean bag using a scissor lift design. The motors on the lift were not strong enough to lift it even with 2 motors.
Damian Hobbs- Elevator Lift, While not as complicated as it looks to build, it has a couple of issues that can be hard to balance. The farthest Link tend to lean forward and sometimes will pop out because of the weight.
For the Mount Everest Challenge I was partnered with Trevon. We started with a elevator lift but vve could not get it to work. We then decided to go with a easy pully lift and this succeded. This challenge was very challenging.
We went with a 6 Bar design on our robot. We put wheels on a square base that we also put our 6 bar on with an attached claw. Our design wasn’t very good because the bar couldn’t be lifted with the two motors that we had put on the side. Our robot could reach above 3ft and could be mobile.
Strengths
-Could move around and be mobile
-Can lift over 3ft
-Can use different gear ratios
Weaknesses
-Bar is not very supported
-Bar is too long
-Bar is too heavy
Rylee McBride - Elevator Lift, It looks very complicated to build, but it isn’t very hard once you know how it works. Balance is a big issue with this lift. The links tend to pop off because of the weight, and they tend to lean over.
Jacob Patrick - We decided with a scissor with a claw to pick up the bean bag. Building the scissor lift was a little bit more difficult than planned. We ran into a lot of problems during our build. The thing that really worked the best for us was the stability at the top so the scissor wouldn’t fall even with some weight on it. This was a great experience and now I know more for the future if I ever use a scissor lift.
Kaden Wood - Scissor lift, we used a scissor lift and a claw to pick up the bean bag and place it on top of the lift which then two motors would walk the lift into the air using metal gears and gear tracks. During this lift we had our ups and downs we had amazing stability for the height of our lift, and springiness which made our motors not work as hard. we ran into a lot of problems with the rotation of the claw but after several rebuilds we got it dialed in. i highly recommend the scissor lift due to stability reasons but make sure you have a good plan on how you are going to make the lift go up.
Tyler Laitinen - Pulley Lift : The Pulley Lift is very simple. I used a claw attached to some string to pull the beanbag up. I used a torque gear ration opposed to a speed ratio. It worked very well.
Brandon- We decided to build an 8 bar lift with a claw at the end. The 8 bar lift lifted objects pretty high which was a good thing. We did run into trouble with the two 8 bar arms though. They were to heavy to lift with just one motor a piece. We also had trouble attaching the claw and maintaining two points of contact for the motor.
For the Mt. Everest challenge me and my partner built a 8 bar lift. It was a fun build it just took a lot of time and motors, it was also very heavy. I was gone for the challenge so I don’t know what went on.
Pros.
can lift really high
Cons.
It had a really heavy arm
Claw was hard to get on
Used a lot of motors
Took a lot of time to build
We attempted to build a basic 2 bar lift. It successfully makes it over the fence, however the motors struggle to lift the bottles with water in them. If we rebuilt the lift, we would try to add more strength to the lift to lift bottles more efficiently.
Actually this is for my Robotics 1 class - they don’t do the VEX competitions till Robotics 2. This is for an assignment called garbage truck. We do reuse the StarStruck fence and we toss water bottles. It’s a lesson on building different types of lifts. I have the students post here as part of the lesson. It’s their first introduction to the VEX Forum. It requires them to register and post a photo and comments for a grade. Sorry if it looks like an old thread but it’s easy for me to grade if we do it here. Thanks!
Originally, we built a scissor lift out of ribbon for our robotic’s class Garbage Truck Challenge. However, after we built the lift our idea to get the soda bottles onto the scissor lift did not work. We decided to modify our original design and instead build a 4-bar lift because we thought of a more effective intake. In the final iteration of our robot, we had a 4-bar lift made of ribbon and a scoop intake. At first we attatched a single pulley to the middle of our scoop, but it pulled the scoop apart. So, we added another pulley and attatched the strings to the two top corners of the scoop. We made our base large so that our robot would be bottom heavy and not tip over. For our lift, we used chain and a gear ratio to increase the torque and help it better lift. We didn’t realize that the string on the pulleys would affect the lift so we had to modify our strategy in the actual challenge.