Questions About Intake

This would depend a lot on the resources available for your team, but there are a few solutions/ways that you could use for your intake. By “spinners,” I assume you mean some sort of wheel or mechanism that spins to intake triballs.

In terms of wheel type, flex wheels tend to be used a lot more often for mechanisms such as the intake due to the varying sizes and durometers that you can choose from. There are quite a few examples of this being implemented within existing Over Under robots, which you could probably find within other threads in this forum and elsewhere online. From what I’ve seen, this seems to be the most common wheel used within intake mechanisms and is used often for many teams who have an intake.

Rubber band rollers are another option that you could consider, although this is not too common lately and was mostly used when flex wheels weren’t legal yet in VRC. You could probably also find other examples of this being used (most commonly in older seasons), such as in this thread I found:

Of course, whatever you use should be decided by you and your team! I encourage you to try different options if you have enough time since that is the most effective way to determine what’s best for your team.

I’m not too sure what you’re referencing here (reference diagrams could be helpful). However, you should note that match reloading for VRC doesn’t necessarily require you to use some mechanism to insert the triball into the robot since it is completely legal to place the triball directly into the robot (for example, into the intake), provided it complies with other rules relating to match loading. From what I imagine your current design may look like, you could use gearing or chains to connect your existing ‘spinners’ to other mechanisms that you might want to use the same motor.

Even if you don’t know how to do that, you could still experiment with your design! There is a ton of reference material online that you could refer to if you’re unsure about anything.

Don’t worry! I don’t really consider myself to have a lot of experience either, but you could really learn a lot from resources that other teams provide online, whether that be reveal videos, posts, guides, etc. You’ll have a lot of time to refine your skills if you continue during VRC, and hopefully, you could guide others later on as well!