Our team just finished building the mobile goal lift, and we have one issue. The mobile goal lift does not stay up after lifting a mobile goal because it can’t handle the weight of the mobile goal. How do we fix this problem?
What kind is it? Can you give us a picture? Generally, a higher (more torquey) gear ratio will make it hold the mogos better. Also, consider if your lift is on a button change the code so that when you aren’t pressing the button the mogo motors have power to hold up the mogos. Even just setting them to a power like 2 or 5 can be enough to hold. Be cautious of overheating, though.
Mechanically restrain your lift from moving further than where you want it to.
Try rubber banding it like a triangle. We used to have that problem before we rebuilt.
Please post a picture, it is hard to troubleshoot a vaguely described problem.
A proper mobile goal lift (in my opinion) should have the mobile goal rest inside the robot once it has been intaken, rather than be lifted up and down by a torque ratio.
For a while, our team used a pneumatic mobile goal lift and the air pressure in the Pistons would keep the mogo up. For motor powered mogo lifts, most of the ones I’ve seen use a rack and pinion or pull the mogo back closer to the center of the robot keeping it in place. I would suggest rubber bands if you aren’t using either of these designs. However, I would like to bring up an interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen in CT, and I’m wondering if anyone else has seen it.
Due to the nature of this year’s game, Mobile Goals make up the bulk of the scoring, worth a total of 50 points as a maximum. Something that interests me is how this plays out during qualifying. As there are enough stackers in any normal competition, any robot that can only lift mobile goals is immediately outclassed during qualifiers and will probably go 0-5, 1-4, 2-3, etc. etc.
However, because of these robots’ high scoring capabilities, they will have a high SP output, despite losing most of their matches. Because of this, these robots will finish in the top of the 1-4 teams and 2-3 robots at any competition around 50 teams in size, basically putting them in the ideal place to be third picked by the top 8 seeds.
Have any of you good folk seen this anywhere else?
Not sure what your mogo intake looks like, could you send a picture? Just going blindly though, I think there are a few options you could explore. Firstly, see if you can rubber band it or add more rubber bands. Secondly, you could look at adding “holding power” to the motor to hold the mogo up. If you’re running it on buttons on the controller (you can use joystick too, just a tad different), if no buttons are pressed for it the motor defaults to 10 or 20 power instead of 0. This way, it provides resistance and holds the intake up.
What our programmers do in a situation where you cannot fix this mechanically (your robot is the way it is) is to program yet another button on the joystick called “MoGo hold” or something like that. Figure out what power it takes to hold the MoGo where you need it to be when you’re driving around, and set the button for that power. Use sparingly, as it does put strain on the motors to be holding up a 4-lb. weight.