I need a little help. (this is my first big robot that I’ve built)
Give your honest opinion on it so far. I know its not any good. I have the drive train (directly driven by the motors, no internal gearing changed) and my intake system partly finished. My mentor is on spring break and I need help with making an conveyor to take balls up to the shooter, and need help with making a single flywheel.
I won’t be able to compete with it, just making it to try and up my ante in the being able to build a functional robot portion of this whole bit
I have somewhat limited parts as you can probably tell (No long piece other than what is on my robot)
It looks pretty good for your first big robot.
The build quality looks nice to.
Here are a few tips:
Try and keep your wheels on the inside of your base. You don’t want other robots hitting your wheels and having the wheels fall off.
For this particular game, I wouldn’t use wheels as the intake. Try intake rollers.
It’s always a good idea to figure out how vex works in your first year of competition.
If you learn how to build and program a robot this year, then you are all set for next year’s game.
I guess the next step would be the second stage of your intake which you can pretty easily do by angling c channels upward as a track for the balls, with a conveyor belt on top to pull the balls up. My biggest piece of advice would be go on youtube and look at all the great examples out there.
Start by settling what overall design you want. (single flywheel, double flywheel, how many wheels, etc.) Then decide what gear ratio you want to run. Past that, gather the materials you need to actually build it, like bearing flats, screws, nuts, motors, spacers, gears, etc. From there I typically mount the bearing flats and motors in the appropriate places, and then attach shafts, spacing, and gears.
How do people use two motors to power one set of gears? I don’t know if you know what I mean but I dont know how else to word it. Like when people have a 4 motor flywheel, they have two motors on each side. What does the second motor do?
The second motor adds torque(strength) to the system. This makes it easier for the motors to spin the gears with all that pressure. With flywheels, having 2 motors usually gives you more speed because usually, one motor does not have the torque to spin the system. That extra torque gives it enough power to spin at max power.
Here is a photo of a robot that my students built. It uses four motors linked by 36 tooth gears with a single axle, highlighted in yellow, that drives the gears up to the flywheel. This should give you some reference.
It’s merely a highlighter on the photo and not gold in real life.
There are numerous axles in the photo that are on the same planes - meaning that two axles are end to end at the same hole with bearings on both sides. It looks like one axle but they are two separate and it’s hard to tell in the photo. The only axle that goes through is the one that I highlighted with a photo editor.
The flat panel acts as a sub-assembly that can be pulled by removing four screws and loosening a shaft collar in less than 30 seconds. It’s set up this way to test (and replace) the motors individually or test the flywheel for friction without the motors. The team even had a spare set ready to go. To answer your question, the gears in this design extended past the edge of the panel and the c-channel edges got in the way.
