Hi, I am new to the vex forum and right now have a really efficient but crappy tower bot. At the moment I and building a new traybot but am having a lot of problems with flipping the intake down and keeping it straight as well. I plan to have the intake reverse and flip out the tray and then have the intakes flip down and straight but do not exactly know how to do that. Any help including any pictures and/or videos greatly appreciated.
Hello there! First off, welcome to the forums. With keeping the intakes straight, you can have a flat piece of metal on the outside of each arm to keep them straight and stop them from decompressing as well. As far as the flipping out is concerned, I would need to see pictures of what you have so far.
I was thinking it being vertical and then going to being parallel to the tray and unfortunately I do not have the intakes done yet and am looking for help on my idea for i have the base and arms built but no intake or tray yet. sry
I also watched some youtube videos for some help and the one idea that i love the most was how 2616J bot flipped down their intakes and managed to keep them straight throughout. I was just very confused how it worked out and eveything. Because I am way more of a driver then a builder but I have to do almost everything besides notebook and programming for my team is very small.
If you plan right you can have fixed intakes
You need a short base. I use a 12.5 inch(25 holes)
I use 30 hole, its tight
I see. I do agree with @Icephoenix0001 though, if you design it right you can have fixed intakes which nullifies the problem of having to flip them out. It also helps a lot with cube compression and twisting.
Photo for reference, both robots have fixed intakes. Left robot is team 9457B, right robot is team 9457W.
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We use 42 hole because we bind the arms together in the back so that there is no slop between the two of them. And yes, it is in the 18" starting dimensions.
Ok thank you and I have now found a way to put hinges on to help with the tray. And I will eventually add some sort of mechanism to keep the cubes in place when the arms go up like you have there. And one last question. Is intaking a cube like the only way to unfold the tray?
Depends on how you build it. With our design we can intake cubes to push it up or flip the arms to push it up as well.
You might want to change the topic category to VRC, because I’m assuming this isn’t for IQ.
Ok that helps with that question a lot and now I have another problem unfortunately after working yesterday. I have a two bar lift and it is not strong at all because it is very shaky and wobbly where the intake is placed.
Yeah so what you have to do then is just reinforce it wherever there is space. What we ended up doing is making the two bar stack out a few holes in the back. We then bound it across the back with two pieces of c channel and sandwiched the arms together like that. We have no noticeable give in our arms (as seen in the picture above).
P.S. I assume the reason you are having give is because you are only using one motor?
what tool do you use to cut plexiglass so nicely?
scissors
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No i am using one motor per arm it looks like the university of Minnesota reveal or UMN. And they are not connected. UMN | VEXU Tower Takeover Reveal - YouTube
Gotcha. Where are your 8 motors delegated if you don’t mind me asking? And yeah I’m aware of the UMN bots, those bots are built by a former 9457B and a former 8110B member (the other Mankato, Minnesota High School) lol
Now back to the task at hand, would you mind sending a picture of your arms and the progress you’ve made? Thanks!
We use a laser engraver at our school to cut lexan.