hey guys, im getting ready to start building a robot for the new year and wanted to know what is the best way to descore… Im also hoping that its legal and simple. that being said, any ideas?
Here, let me just design your robot for you.
The question you are asking is literally the challenge given to every team in the world. Part of the build experience is trying things until you get it to work. Keep an engineering notebook of everything you tried, and present it to judges at competitions you go to. That’s the entire point of VEX.
If you have an idea, I (and many others) would be happy to tell you how we would improve it.
Amr267, I want you to know that that last post probably wasn’t intended to be condescending. Your post just sounded a bit like you were asking someone to design your robot. In the future I would suggest phrasing the question more like “What ideas do people have for descoring this year?”
You should also try searching the forums first. A quick search for “descore” turned up the following thread which you might pull some ideas from: descoring - VRC > Previous Games - VEX Forum
i really did word that in the wrong way but my point was to see what ideas people had that are more evolved then the other forum. i feel like this thread was understood in the wrong way and i understand the challenge. this is quite surprisingly going to be my fourth year in vex and hopefully my fourth time in worlds. last year alone my team had won 8 awards total including the judges award at the world championship. again, im sorry if this post sounded weird but i wanted to see what concepts are being considered at this point.
Thanks for the point but i never meant the post in that way and for the record i would love for you to come and build the robot for me but thats tales the fun away. i hope to see you in worlds then. Good luck in the new season then.
No worries I wouldn’t have even said anything if Ephemeral hadn’t - I was just trying to rephrase his post more nicely.
As for the actual topic, we don’t start doing anything until school starts, so sorry! Anyone else have anything to say?
what about a piece of metal connected to the string in the winch and pulley system that vex has. would you be able to lower it into a goal and when you real it back in the metal also pulls out a few of the bucky balls? i mean it may not be the most accurate but it may be effective if it works.
Be careful of entanglement with string- Karthik already wanred about this. It’d be on you to not cause an issue most likely as another robot forces you away form the 24" goal.
The process of forcing this mechanism to the bottom of the plastic goal needs to account for buckey balls stacked against the sides. Try and think how can you force it past them with just a string and just some weighted metal. Gravity might not carry it as far down as you would like. Some poker may be necessary but how far can your reach when you have 12" a bridge to get under first.
The other consideration is you can still only posess a maximum 3 buckeys even as you de-score. So multiple trips will be required to clean out a full 24" plastic goal. To make matters worse, you will have to drop your buckeys in the process and pick them up later. Say goodbye to those elements if your opponent has anything to say about it!
De-scoring a beach ball from the goal zone is worth just as many points as removing a buckey ball from the tube (maybe less if you drop them on to the goal zone floor making it a net -3 points per buckey ball.) Un-capping a 24" goal is a good -5 points if you move it to the floor, -10 if you simply hold theirs above the floor or move it back to the 12" rails.
I can see the desire to do 24" goal de-scoring. A -15 point swing is nice to grab and hold 3 of their buckeys out of the 24" goal at the very last second. Just be completely clear of the goal when the buzzer sounds.
One problem you’re going to have is pushing the Buckyballs that are near the sides of the cylinder out of the way of this falling piece of metal. They don’t stack nicely, as I’m sure you know.
Additionally, if your only forms of motion are gravity pulling your mechanism down and the pulley to bring it up, if the piece falls four balls down and you have to pull it out, you just got disqualified. Trying to get the timing correct to go passed three objects would be an immense driving challenge.
I would recommend powering your descore mechanism’s descent.
I’m guessing you will be dedicating a motor or two for your descorer? My personal view right now in the early stage of Toss Up is that descoring from the stash goals won’t be that important. Later on, however, it might become more necessary; but for now, I don’t see it as important.
I do have a couple ideas though. I might share my drawings/CAD later on.
You could put an encoder on the motor dropping the string and make it stop at the correct point every time.
the point of this design is that when a buckyball is pulled out, it just falls on the floor so your not possessing it and it would only use a motor. my one and only concern is entanglement. the additional pros to this include less space used and less motors and you wouldn’t really be possessing any if you move them out slowly. i feel like this will be a skill that everyone will be looking for in state and other major competitions. im waiting for anymore ideas to come to mind but as stated before this is the single biggest challenge at the moment. so anymore plausible ideas? even a concept… i dont want to teams to just copy each other.
There won’t be a perfect point. Say you want to remove just the top two. Or 2-4, because there isn’t a fifth in there.
You could do it in increments, I guess. One ball at a time. But that’s inefficient.
You’re incorrect here. While pulling game objects out of the cylinder, the ones moving would count as being possessed by your robot.
thats true but thats why the first time you go down deep enough to pull out the first three. we all want sp points too. we also want more space to score as many as possible. i really like this years game. it excites me to know all of the challenges.
You could do the encoder in increments (ie push a button repeatedly to make it go down one ball each time.) So if there were only 3 balls in the goal you would press it five times to get to the bottom.
Just throwing ideas out there. Not sure how practical it would actually be but I think it could work.
You know, you could code it like that. It would take a bit of doing, but using four face buttons you could macro commands based on how deep you want it to go.
I almost want to build one of these just so I can write the program for it…
Haha being the programmer for our team I know exactly what you mean 
Although I’m not convinced that the string descorer would even work so the point is probably moot
so now that we have the issue of the programing down for the string descorer then i feel the next issue that should be figured out is how to have the metal to pull out the buckyballs. i was thinking maybe if a bar goes in the long way, then it can be pulled out sideways and it can work but im not completely sure… any ideas then?
Until you build a vacuum to pull out the buckyballs, I can assure you that you will be called for entanglement, possession of more than 3 balls, and pretty much every rule that can be tossed at a descorer. I can assure you nobody will be descoring in any match I’m playing. 
i think i speak for the rest of the vex community when i say this… ^^^
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