Lift demos

Please. More photos. Of the eight other types of lifts.

We have made more durable versions of several (4bar, reverse, 6bar, rack and pinion) with motor and brain to either slowly cycle continuously (counting cycles and timing how long battery lasts) or driving by buttons, watching encoder values.

Obviously, we need to add more color!

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Here is a link to pictures of some of the models. https://photos.app.goo.gl/cHH8IZbqnWlTMaa53 Keep in mind that a model is worth a thousand pictures. Here is a video that my younger son and I made a few years ago. It explains the basic lift types:

These models are hard to keep together. I did make a stronger scissor lift, but it was way too much fun; put a puncher on the end and you could whack someone with it from 5 feet away. I had to take it apart and forgot to get pictures.

Some other interesting lifts…

Cross linked DR4B. This one is hard to explain. We got the idea from our FRC team. Here is a picture of their robot that used it.


The advantage of this lift is that it can be very lightweight, fast, and most importantly it has a low center of gravity even when fully extended. The tradeoff is that it doesn’t go precisely straight up, there is a little bit of a sway to it.

Non-symmetrical 6 bar. In robotics we usually try to make our 4 bar and 6 bar linkages symmetrical. And it is important that new teams start out this way. But if you were to look up “six bar linkage” in Wikipedia those mechanisms don’t look anything like what we are used to. The beams can be all different lengths and attached at odd points. Here is an example of you what can do with a 6 bar just by changing the geometry slightly.

Normal 6 Bar:



Non-symmetrical 6 bar:
Down
Half

You might be asking yourself why you would want something like this. Click here to open a sample model made in RobotMesh Studio as a mimic.
I haven’t tried sharing anything like this before, so please let me know if it doesn’t work. When you first open the project your screen should look like this:


Click on the Mimic tab to see the 3D model:
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Then press the Run button:
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On the right of the screen you should see a list of devices that is mostly empty:

Note that gravity will pull the lift down to the starting position. Now use the slider control to the right of the “Lift Motor” to control the motor speed in the model:
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Move the slider to the left slightly to set the motor speed to Reverse 20:
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The block should slide off the front of the model when the lift is almost fully extended.
So a lift like this might be useful for a forward facing high dump truck. This is just one example, moving the placement of the connector pins or changing the lengths of any of the beams changes the whole motion. Endless possibilities.

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TYVM!

I’ve shown that vid to my kids, very helpful, good energy.

Mimic works, your description how to access is perfect. Lotsa gravity, not much friction in that world !!!

You have more mimics?

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On the Robot Mesh Studio project management page (this one) make sure “Show my projects only” is unchecked and click on the Public tab. It will list every project that anyone has shared with the public. For example, I found this one fairly close to the top of the pile. You can also sort by project type, then scroll to the sections with IQ Mimic projects (in two major flavors, Blockly and Python, which will be in two clusters).

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Yes. Many there, I’ve spent some hours. Awesome rapid prototyping and program development tool.

This particular one needs to be copied (goes to “My Projects”) and edited to add programming. Some will be “Private” and so can’t be copied. Need to “Sign Up” and “Log In” to save for later.

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I photoshop, colorprint and laminate (love my laminator) and put up with magnets so they can take it down and hold it, take it to a table. I like to have different styles of the same example: color!!!, B/W, industrial, EDR (we are IQ only in Elementary school), engineering drawing, artistic, and actual real-world IQ models.

From your photos:

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