Our mentor told us that while the disk is going up the intake, it should fall into a plate that the flywheel then zooms off. But how should the intake be connected to the flywheel so that when the disk comes, it starts spinning? Or the flywheel spins all match but wouldn’t that burn out the motor?
the short answer is that the intake probably shouldn’t be at all connected to the flywheel.
When you are dealing with intaking and then shooting objects with a flywheel, there are typically 3 mechanisms that need to handle the objects in different ways. The first is an intake, which of course collects objects off of the ground and into the robot. The third is the flywheel, which of course throws objects that come into contact with the wheel. But there is also a second mechanism between the intake and flywheel called an indexer, who’s job it is to store a cache of intaked objects just before going into the flywheel, and then push or otherwise direct the objects into the flywheel in a precise and controlled manner.
The reason for this is because if you just link the intake and the launcher together, then if you have a disc near the top of the intake close to the flywheel, you cannot intake another disc without also shooting one. Which is obviously not ideal, you don’t want to be uncontrollably shooting discs while intaking. And the issue with having intake and flywheel separate is similar, even though you can control the two independently, you still have no way of controlling when a disc is fed into the flywheel separate from intaking.
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Your question sounds a little beyond the spirit of the VEX program. A team’s robot should reflect their ability to design, build, etc. Your mentor might need to read through REC’s student centered policy - they shouldn’t be telling you what to build or what your robot should do. You should be trying to figure out what you want the robot to do, how you might be able to accomplish that and how to then build that idea, test it and try again if it’s not giving you the results you want.
To that end, have you tried to come up with your own ideas before immediately coming here to ask how to build something your mentor told you to build? What has/hasn’t worked for you? The forum will definitely help you troubleshoot problems after you’ve come up with your own design ideas.
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Oh, the mentor part was just me telling that idea to someone and them just repeating it. But when we were discussing about it, l came up with the question.
I think you should and use a piston to turn the intake on and off and use a piston to push the disk form storage to the flywheel