I was wondering, since this year we can expand, and having enough capacity to hold a lot of stars/cubes is an plus, does anyone have a design for a conveyor belt that could expand to hold more stars/cubes. Or at least a concept I could build off of.
An idea could be to store the stars like some people stored their cubes in the year of skyrise, but again you would have to figure out how to grip a weirdly shaped object.
I know, i want to do that too, but im trying to get a design so the conveyor could expand to hold more stars or cubes.
Expanding conveyors is pretty difficult…
You will need a separate, moving tensioner in order to keep the chain from slipping when the conveyor expands. Our team tried to accomplish this in Skyrise to some success, but it takes a significant amount of tweaking and adjusting to ensure that the chain stays taut throughout the entire expansion.
If you really want to try something like this, make sure that your hooks are as streamlined as possible to begin with. If there are really big hooks on the chain, it makes it even more difficult to flip out correctly.
Honestly, I would recommend losing the indexing capability and just dump all the objects into a basket for storage/dumping/launching, since while it is possible, an expanding conveyor might not be worth the effort.
Ok, would it be possible to make a second set that would flip up and out, like a 7 and then like a /, so when you intake something, it would be “expanding”
I’ve posted this in another thread about the same thing
I’ve already toyed the idea of a vex telescopic conveyor, since it was going to be used in many of my designs, and sadly, it’s impossible as far as i know, and here’s why:
for a conveyor belt, it needs to be tight. However, there is no way to make a telescopic conveyor both tight and smooth when using vex chains. If you did make it really tight, it would make the extending VERY rough. I’ve built a prototype of it to test it.
These are patented designs used for industrial extending conveyor belts. These should help.
Also, do you plan to have anything on the conveyor belt? Stand offs to hold the star onto the belt? Because if that’s the case, only the belt from figures 6 and 7 are do-able, but will still be very rough.
Accidentally pressed “quote” when i wanted to edit this post 
Ignore the post that I’ve deleted.
Well, thank you, but it will take a while to start to understand them
so I just may do the flipping out design if I absolutely need it.
How many motors do you think would be necessary for this theoretical intake? This could work well, but do you know what kind of motor power would be required for it?