Tips on making the smoothest and fastest roller for TT

[BeyondAiden]

Hi, our robot currently works well enough, strong enough to get 11 cube stacks, but the downside is that we HAVE to use 100RPM motors in order for it to be strong enough to get the cubes. We’ve seen many competitions and reveals, where the robots can roll in cubes extremely fast (namely 6842Z PigPen, and 7701T Tesseract). I know using 200 RPM motors would help a lot, but we just can’t seem to make it work. Does anyone have any tips on making the smoothest rollers possible? Thanks!

[Riptide]

If you use 18 tooth sprockets, make the rollers almost paralell with the tray, and increase the angle of your tray, you should be able to do at least 12 cubes with enough compression.

[293X]

First, please send some pictures of your rollers so we can help you out.

In short, its all about compression. Make sure you have the correct compression, enough so that it can easily push up cubes, but wide enough for them to restrict the intaking of cubes. While doing so, make sure that they cant bend out so the cubes to push the roller out and become uncompressed.

Additionally, take a look at your sprocket sizes and intaking angle to optimize the efficiency of the intake. Use sprockets that provide compression towards your specific design and note that the shallower the tray angle is, the easier it is to intake cubes.

Take a look at these posts:

How to increase intake efficiency

Hello all! I made a new intake design for compression(in this video (https://youtu.be/XYdanzbIQEU), and it works for compression, but the intakes have to take it at a specific angle(right on). Is there any way I can optimize these intakes for schlorking cubes? My tray is 6 inches

Optimizing Intake Rollers

Now that the meta designs are relatively evident, I see both advanced trays and tray db4s remaining prevalent for quite some time. Both of these designs use intake rollers to pull cubes onto a tray. This begs the question, what kind of intake roller is best? This post is a general purpose question to see what’s working well for the community.

Intake rollers need to provide enough compression to intake 11 cubes (in extreme instances) while also allowing stack deploys to remain unaffected. What is the ideal length of flap, size/ratio of sprocket, and frequency of flap (links between flaps) to achieve this most efficiently?

How To Fix Intake Compression [Guide]

I figured out a simple and easy lock mechanism for intakes to fix nearly all compression issues. The tricky balancing game between strength, being able to bend the intakes back, the bands not snapping, and the arm spreading when the tilter is tilted forwards is solved by a simple lock as seen below or on youtube
https://youtu.be/yz4coBYe3sU

[Xenon27]

the friction of the tray is pretty important too. having a low friction tray can be the difference between 100 RPM and 200 RPM intakes.

[BeyondAiden]

I will take pics tomorrow and send it here, thanks for the threads!

[BeyondAiden]

Our tray is pretty low friction, we used zipties and cubes slide very smoothly

[BeyondAiden]

Wouldn’t increasing the angle of the tray make it harder to grab cubes? Cuz you’d be going against gravity more

[mvas]

If you have a cascading tray, the weight of the final stage actually adds a decent amount of force against the intakes. In general, make your intakes as efficent as possible, reduce as much friction as possible. Compression is the final most important step that is a matter of tuning.

[Riptide]

whoops…
I meant to lower it, but if you lower it too much it’ll hit everything.