It may be hard to describe but the team need help. Our intake work great, but the up-take to lift the balls up to the flywheel is the problem. The team is using 2 conveyors… one on each side of the ball. We are trying to use one motor instead of 2, and we are trying to find a way to drive both with one motor. However one have to be reversed since they must be opposite of each other. We wanted to try to figure a way to drive the other side with chain, but reversed. We cannot come up with a way to reverse it. Any suggestions?
gears tend to reverse rotation direction.
You can use 2 gears (of the same size) to reverse the direction. You can drive one of the gears with a chain (connected to your motor) and then connect the other gear to the chain that drives the intake.
Thanks @4256. We were hoping to avoid having to build a big box on it, but we may have to do it. We are hoping to use that 2nd motor for lift assist.
@Michael Nutt… It does not reverse when there are 2 gears. They rotate the same direction so the ball would just spin in one spot.
When two gears are meshed together, they spin in opposite directions. The gears would be the same size, not different sizes.
Michael and I were talking about the same thing really. You can make it very compact if you play with the spacings. All you need to do is put one 12 tooth gear on the axle you are driving and one the axle being driven by the sprocket. So you really only need room for one extra hole (for the second gear).
We are doing the same thing with the solutions above and we have found that if your balls compression is high when in the intake then the motor will be hard pressed to push the ball through the intake and we are now reverting back to 2 motors on the intake but if you are using flaps this doesn’t apply.
Yep this is definitely very important. If your intake is squeezing the ball it will not work very well. I’ve had the intake stall out in competition because the spacings were too tight. You want the chains to be just barely close enough to hold the balls up.
@ Michael Nutt and Mystical Pie… my mistake… I was thinking of 2 sprockets chained together instead of gears… my bad. Long day! Gears would do it like 4256 said and others… I just for some reason could not get the sprockets out of my head. Sorry … my bad. BUT those ideas will work.
@OverlyOptimisticProgramer I definitely agree on the pressure. The pressure we have is pretty loose right now and we are using long flaps to carry them from mid-way back to the up take. The uptakes are also loose with long flaps. We have very little pressure on the balls.
@n5vei This is only the case with high compression (<3.5" between sides) so does not apply usually unless your friction is unusually high or motor is malfunctioning
The image below shows what one of my teams did a couple years ago. They used it on a chain bar arm so that the manipulator at the end of the arm would rotate as they lifted the arm. the sprockets marked in red will rotate in opposite directions.
[attachment:56bc7a4e08cdc]
@Baron Boopington I am trying to convince the captain of that, but he wants to test this to see if it is faster. That was my original thought, but the thought on the downside is the it rolls more with a a single uptake vs the 2 lifting. I do agree with you though that the single would be the easiest solution. Thanks
Oh… @JayM… That is kind of what was stuck in my head. Thanks
As many have said, gears can effectively inverse the direction of rotation on the driven conveyor. I would suggest chaining from a sprocket on the bottom conveyor, being driven by a motor, to a separate axle adjacent to the axle of the top conveyor. On the axle adjacent to the top conveyor axle, have a gear that meshes with a gear on the axle of the top conveyor on a 1:1 ratio.