My team and some of my friends are recommending to use low strength shafts for the intake, but cant another bot just ram me and disable my robots intake? I was planing to use high strength shafts, but my team says its meta do use low strength.
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Yes
No
An LS axle will most definitely bend under pressure, so if you are going to use one, you will need some sort of “guard” (like a c-channel) in front of it to protect it.
HS axles, for VRC purposes, are considered the strongest piece aside from zip ties. So if you use a high strength shaft for your intake, you wouldn’t need any guard in front of it. They are just kind of unwieldy to mount.
Where did your teammates get the LS meta idea? I’ve never heard any real controversy over that…
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My teammates said they got it from hole counting ACE robotics
So, obviously I should use HS-shaft for stage-1 intake. I used 1x2 C-channel last year, but i had some nasty friction issues. I was planning to use 1x3 C-channel so i could mount a High-strength-ball-bearing to reduce the friction. But my question is if this will cause a weight issue? I think it wont because the stage-2 intake is very large and in the rear so I assume the 1x3 will move the center of gravity from the rear to middle.
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Yes, it would move the CoG forward some, and your intake would be slightly heavier (assuming you’re using aluminum, and not heavier steel). It probably won’t cause too much of a weight issue unless your CoG is already too far forward.
I wouldn’t say though that you need a ball bearing, HS bearing flats work fine for me right now. Your friction from last year was probably due to some misalignment or build issue.
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We did have some alignment issues last year, and because of that my team has been obsessing over alignment… If i were to use High-strength-ball-bearing instead of HS-bearing-flats wont it fix alignment issues? because i’m willing to sacrifice a half pound or so to make my robot have minimal friction and to not become unaligned.
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No… bearing flats just keep the shaft in place, not fix alignment issues.
Alignment issues can be fixed by bracing your intake.
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is it worth it to use bearings on intake or is it better to use bearing flats
Depends.
My intake spins at around 600 rpm, works just fine, and I use bearing flats.
Bearing flats enable the use of 1x2x1 c-channels, which makes your intake both smaller and lighter. They’re fine for most intakes.
Ball bearings are a little heavier and take up more room, but aren’t worth it if your intake doesn’t spin fast enough (and by fast enough I mean VRC Spin Up Flywheel 3600 rpm fast).
So… unless your intake is like 3000 rpm, ball bearings aren’t worth it.
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I know this is an older post. Our intake is very slow. Can you give us some tips to increase our intake chain?
make the driven sprocket (one on the motor) bigger and the one that is driving the intake smaller if you wanted more speed but less torque
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If this doesn’t work for you I recommend drilling the High strength bearing or pillow you are using to have a larger inner diameter so the shaft has less friction.
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idk what motor cartridge you are using but if you are using the green (18:1 Cartridge (200 RPM))change it to the blue cartridge (6:1 Cartridge (600 RPM)).
If that doesn’t work It looks like your upper half has no bracing and your current bracing is the HS shaft. I recommend getting an l channel and placing it horizontally across both sides of the stage 2 intake below where your hooks run through. I also recomend for you to make the High strength shaft have only the spacers in the middle to hold the hook inplace and not cover the entire shaft.
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Can you give me an example of what your talking about? We tried swapping out the green cartridges for the blue ones. Nothing changed. Thank you for your suggestions!
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Here is a pic of our beater scrimmage bot. HD. Axle with HD bearing flats, 600rpm cartridge, 1:1 chain gearing.
Plenty of bracing (perhaps a bit overkill) to keep the axle aligned even during heavy bashing.
Remove your motor and make sure the axle and wheel combo spins absolutely freely. Then brace it up, checking every single step of the way that the axle continues to spin easily and freely. Tighten everything securely with nylock nuts. Check again for free spinning before adding the motor back in.
A 600rpm direct drive motor should be plenty fast, but go to your code and set the rpm to 100% to get the max speed out it.
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I did this once… and it was because we forgot to change our motor code to blue cartridges and set velocity to 100%
Few pointers:
- 1x1 bars flex really easily, and are bad for bracing. Might want to swap those for 1x10x1 L-channels.
- Might want to box brace that front 1x3x1 c-channel
- You seem to have a lot of structure there, you could clean it up by taking out some c-channels and using standoffs, zip ties, polycarb, etc.
Nice bot otherwise though!
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