So, My vex team and I are in a little bit of a pickle, Our intake is not working so we scrapped it. So can somebody please give us a picture or design of a good intake. And it isalso for the nothing but net comp! thanks:D
A lot of teams in our region are getting two large sprockets set apart about 10" with spacers in between with rubber bands attached around the outside. The rubber bands go around to diameter of the sprockets pulling them towards each other.
This sketch here depicts a simplistic intake that can be built in 10-20 minutes dependent on your build efficiency (and if you have the parts available, if you need to cut parts, this would clearly take longer).
This is a top view sketch.
You have your input source (the motor) spinning your larger gear (as you want it geared for speed for a fast intake) spinning a smaller gear. I would suggest making this gear ratio equivalent to or greater than the ratio of your drive train.
Wheels
There are a variety of wheels that you could use for the intake. For instance, the 2.75" wheel. However, mix it up, and get creative. Some teams have used zip ties, or sprockets with tank treads and flaps wrapped around them.
Width
Width can be adjusted very easily with the depicted design to your needs. Simply add or subtract wheels to modify the width of the intake.
Floor Clearance
Minor ball compression on an intake is typically good to ensure that you get a good grab on the ball (or any game piece, for that matter). I would suggest a ball compression of about 0.10". however, some would argue more. Feel free to adjust it to your needs. So, for a ball compression of 0.10", the distance between the lowest point on the wheel and the floor would be 3.90".
Hopefully this helps. Let me know if you need any more help.
Here is our intake, we went through several designs before finding one we liked, the intake rollers are on an arm that pivots x so they can go up and down, this allows it to adjust to more or less dense balls
oops, had trouble attaching files, here links
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1LLlSCW4Hm5dTFHVEZtaGZYbEU/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1LLlSCW4Hm5dHdHR1JEdWxkV3M/view?usp=sharing
If all fails you can always consider a side roller 
Ya, that’s what my team uses and it seems to work just as well as any of the top rollers.
Nothing bad about side rollers in performance, they are actually better in performance than top rollers. They do though have the problem of taking up to much space, and hard to power off one motor.
Thank you very much, we are going to try out the side rollers. Any suggestions?
i think i might or a moving top roller to get the whole stack
My experience with the side rollers is that they tend to push the balls away rather than pull them in. I’m sure if you had a good design that was effective in pooling in the balls, that it could work very well. That’s the only problem I had with them, they were very good with the transition onto the single flywheel we are using. We only scrapped the idea because of the issue with the initial intake. Good luck!