!Hello there,
For Skyrise we are using whats known as the Continuous Linear Lift design. We have seen on other robots that use this exact lift design that the lift goes much faster. We were wondering whether anyone knows how we can make it quicker…
This is how we have chained our lift so far…
Thanks!
We sped up our lift by increasing the size of the drive sprocket.
If you’d like to keep it a continuous elevator, then to speed it up you would need to increase the overall ratio. This could be done by increasing the size of the drive sprocket, or if you have a gear ratio that the motors are driving, you could also change that.
Also, depending on how many motors you have powering the lift and how much weight it is trying to lift, it may be running slower than normal because you might be putting too large of a load on the motors. Adding additional motors may help speed it up if this is occurring.
PM me if you have any more questions. I’ve done quite a bit with elevators and are one of the sub-systems I’m most experienced on.
-Nick
Hi Nick,
I saw that you said you had some experience with elevator lifts and I had a quick question.
My team is doing an elevator lift for the first time and we are having a few issues with the lift not going all of the way up. We have four stages on each side (they turn inwards) with the intake being the final stage. The first stage goes up fairly well, but after that it’s pretty rough. We only have two motors, so we are planning to add two more in hopes that this helps. One of our biggest issues is that we don’t know what to do with the chain -we opted for a non-continuous loop, so as the robot goes up the chain just hangs down and gets tangled. Do you have any suggestions for how to “wrap” the chain?
Thank you!!!
Grayson
One more thing I forgot to add. Everyone keeps telling us that the innermost stage should lift up first, but it seems that our elevator lifts the outside stages first. Is this an issue??
Thanks!!
Try to keep all of the chain paralell to each other. That reduces the slack issue. But I would rather have slack than let the chain get tighter when the lift extends, so a little controlled slack is not bad.
For a continuous chain or rope elevator, any stage can go up first, depending on which stage has least friction.
I’ve built one of those lifts. One of the problems I realize I had with it is the amount of motors I had. I originally had 2 motors on it (It didn’t work well). If you add 4 motors it should be faster and it should handle weight better.
Changing the overall sprockets help a lot too. Same with gears, although I highly disagree with using compound gear trains.
What we want is all tiers to go up at the same time… Is there a way of doing this with a continuous lift?
Oh, ok! That would be called a telescopic lift. There are separate chain links attached to each of the rails.
You can either use chain links or string. I would say that chains are better.
Right OK, so basically the chain is attached to each of the bottom stages of each tier?
Pretty much! It’s pretty easy. It would also be better it you put lubricant or grease in the slides to minimize friction.