OK, just a question.
We have 4 intake rollers on each side of our intake. When picking up a barrel it goes slower than I wanted, but I was wondering if I took 2 off of each side, it would make it collect faster.
I am saying this because the intake rollers are all very stiff right now, and I was wondering if it was causing to much pressure on the barrel.
Thoughts?
Are the axles direct-driven from motors, or are there gears in place to absorb some of the shockload? What motors are you using - 269? 393? 3-wire?
Also, rather than remove rollers, consider their position relative to the gamepieces. If you move them back and forth on the axles, you may see some interesting results.
Taking one off really wouldn’t do that much.
What would help is if you either
The intake rollers work better with smaller game pieces. Look at green egg in elevation and also 3018 in roundup.
You need something with a larger suction radius for a larger object.
I am not trying to say the rollers won’t work, but there is better solutions to the game (in my opinion).
make the intake wider…
or adjustable with elastics
cut some of the tabs off the intake rollers its extremely effective we did it for round up and made our pole 2x faster by cutting off all but 4 tabs per roller we did it with regular wire cutters (diagonal pliers)
Use a larger diameter intake wheel. The motor speed does not matter; what matters is the surface speed of the intake wheel. increasing the intake diameter is an easy way to increase your intake speed.
Additionally, the larger the intake diameter the steeper the force vector pulling on the object is. With a small diameter intake on either side you need to be perfectly alligned because being a little bit off is actually pushing the game piece sideways. The larger the diameter of the intake wheel the more misaligned you can be on the game piece while actually pulling it in towards your robot.
if your talking about the vex made black intake rollers, those are ok, its just there too slow for collecting objects this size. Trust me, we used the those on 1138B when we first designed our intake, but then we switched those for a sprocket intake. With a sprocket that has chain around it your can make it go the exact speed you want, because you can change between diameters (speed).
We had our first competition today and it was great!
We got 7th place but learned a ton!
About the intake rollers.
We found that cutting tabs off helps a lot. We have a total of 6 tabs on each intake roller except the outside 2. We are planning to experiment with them next meeting.
Thank you for all your help!