I’ve been designing a Snailbot lately and can’t decide what is the best/most effective mechanism to use for the outtake. Which mechanism would be most useful - a flywheel or a roller (like this one)
in my first design i used a fly wheel but i switched to a rubber-band roller because i think i saw Y-not’s video and it looked like it scored well enough.
i dont think conveyor like in the pic above would work well personally but i cant test rn without materials.
I would do rubber band rollers personally. I think tuning compression with tread on sprockets is harder because they have no margin of error (they’re hard). With rubber band rollers my idea is you can just overcompress and it will compensate because of the bands.
In my opinion, there really is no need for a flywheel that can shoot balls. All you need are fast rollers that can make cycling as fast as possible.
And like what @2990B_DQ said, I’d personally recommend using rubber band rollers because they offer far more compression than hard wheels you normally find on a flywheel.
Well I wouldn’t say more because they aren’t pressing the ball harder than a hard roller/fw would be, they just have variable compression which is good for reliability and simplicity.
they’re essentially the same thing, just different styles of rollers.
I used tank tread in that CAD for simplicity, and it has been proven to work as an outake:
but rubber band rollers will work well also:
I don’t think a classic flywheel will work well, those are better for long range shots of smaller projectiles, and while they would work with close range change up balls, I think the other two options are better.
If you want to hold more than 3 balls at a time, then I’d say either a flywheel or something powered separately (or use a tonne of ratchets). Using an indexer and a top roller let you set up without fear of losing any ball by accident. This means that treads will have slower cycle times.
We have tried just about every combination, treads on sprockets has been the best for us. The tuning is a pain but the results are rewarding. You can hold up to 6 if you do it right.