How close does your intake touch the ground

VEX V5 General Discussion
#1

Having issues with my middle school teams, they think that their tray has to be like right on the field to pick up the discs, but at the same time they are destroying my new tiles. Just wondering if you can fit a piece of paper under ur intake tray or not…

#2

You should be able to have space under the bottom of your tray free. It should not be low enough to destroy the tiles. I found that as long as the bottom of the tray touches lower than the center of the disk, you should be good

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#3

If the intake is scraping against the tiles you run the risk of snapping the polycarbonate when stopping abruptly. Learned that one the hard way…
A scraping intake isn’t good for drive speed either as it adds a lot of friction.

2 Likes
#4

Also make sure they are testing on the field. We were good on tables but would sink into the foam tiles enough that dragging messed up our autonomous drive forward straight.

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#5

For a poly ramp, get it close to the ground but file or cut it until the bottom is 1/16” or more above the ground.

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#6

Teams use .5 OD nylon spacers as rollers to keep the tray close to the floor tiles without damaging. They also should be able to go over the low goal barrier.

6 Likes
#7

I made that mistake our first tournament, when we finished the bot 5 min before the tournament. Because we didn’t really test our bot in a field, sometimes we could not go forward, because the intake was scratching against the floor, although we were able to go backwards.

1 Like