I’ve seen a lot of beautiful reveal videos that involve very smartly-made intakes. There’s a plate with about five or six super long standoffs on them. These pick up stars by their legs and sweeps cubes up from underneath. I really want to do this with our robot. Our problem is size limits. We’ve only built the base of our robot, nothing else. We have about an inch in each direction of space left before our robot hits the size limit.
I’ve noticed that the key point in this challenge is speed, as you want to be faster than your opponent. The faster robot will be able to get objects over the fence faster than the other side and overwhelm them. To ensure we have a decent chance at being the faster of the two sides, we’ve used six wheel drive.
We’re using the 6 remaining motors for extra mechanisms (everything apart from the wheels). There’s a high chance each of those mechanisms (Intake, Catapult, Dumper, Lift, etc.) will use two motors each. If we do end up using the standoff type intake, the standoffs pointing forward will most certainly exceed the size limit (By plenty of inches). The only fix I can see to this is to use a motor or two to hold up the intake, then let it down while the competition starts (Because you can exceed the limit after the comp starts, not while in starting position). All the reveal videos that use this type of intake don’t show us what their robot looks like at the starting position, and if they do, they don’t clearly show what kind of mechanism they use to keep the standoffs from exceeding the size limit.
My question is as follows:
Is there any way to hold up or keep the standoff-type intake from exceeding the size limit at the beginning of the match, without having extra motors dedicated to that sole purpose?
Yes.
Okay maybe I should elaborate. There are a few ways to do this.
Method 1: Black magic
Method 2: Have the intake held in by something else. Then, you use rubber bands to make it so that when you move your arm, the intake will open up. Take a closer look at 8059D’s intake for something like this; I think there was a gif somewhere in there. Theirs was slightly different because they made it so that when the robot moves forward the intake can fall out.
Thanks! This really helped. I’ll go with method one. (Just kidding)
THANKS
Flip-out Intake
Take a look at this. This thread has some ideas for locking mechanisms, and as other people have said you can have spring loaded (rubber band loaded, actually) release mechanism controlled by some other mechanism.