Hey, im trying to make a bot, but i want to be able to pick up objects, with a forklift type idea, and to be able to lift my own robot with a four bar lift. the trick is, i want to do it all with 1 motor, or 1 set of motors. i dont want a different motor for each thing
Is this your first robot? I would really not recccomend doing this
One motor wouldn’t be a very good idea, but a set of motors should be reasonably straight forward. Lots of teams lift and score with one set of motors, as the forklift shouldn’t have to use any power and the lift can be powered by the forklift’s lifting arm. You could also make it a bit more complicated and use a ratchet like some of the NBN robots.
Look at the design in this ri3d reveal. https://vexforum.com/t/robot-in-3-days-teaser/35573/1 They use the same motors to launch and to lift. If you have any questions about that design ask on that thread.
A complicated yet cool way of doing this is called a ratchet transmission. When you spin the motors on way, it powers one thing, when it spins the other way it powers something else. To do this you need two ratchets facing opposite directions. Here is a video of a ratchet and pawl mechanism. And here is a ratchet transmission.
There’s kind of two separate questions in play here.
Can one mechanism (powered by one motor set) do multiple tasks? Definitely, depending on the design. If possible to incorporate into your design, having one mechanism serve multiple functions allows more motor power to be devoted to those functions. It’s a good idea.
Can one set of motors power two independent mechanisms? This is possible, but somewhat difficult. This is generally called power take-off and requires some way to shift the output of the motor set (transmission) from one mechanism to another. This is fairly complicated to do in VEX, and generally should be avoided unless you really know what you’re doing with crash shifters or double ratchet mechanisms or the like.