Our team is currently struggling to create a intake for high stakes and we don’t have the small flex wheels. We would like help on how we could create an intake we have about 9 days time and a little side time.
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Just gonna put this here…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVJiYMsHSSw
Notice how their hook intake picks up directly off the floor. It’s not too hard to build, but if you do it, make sure to use polycarbonate hooks bent with a heat gun, do NOT try and use metal as it is much more difficult. Also, don’t just spin the hook continuously, either use a distance sensor or have it manually operated.
I will try and maybe get a video of my team’s robot, which operates on a similar mechanism.
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Maybe try an Apollo 13 improv style using what you do have. Here I have sprockets, some tank tread chain and flaps, and an axle. Brainstorm. Prototype, Test, Document results. Repeat.
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you could use two sprockets that have rubber bands running across from each other and that seems to work pretty well
Our robot has used large (3 inch) flex wheels for our first three competitions and they work very well. It uses a similar design to intakes with small flex wheels.
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I think this idea will work well, but you have to tune it a lot so it can work better
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Yes! I was hoping more people would check that out. It simplifies the whole intaking process and also makes their intake unbelievably fast. I would recommend that if this is something anyone is interested in building, definitely check out some of their matches.
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I’ve seen how doing the rubber band and sprocket method works about as well as using flex wheels for the intake
flex wheels are better though because they have more grip but if you don’t have them then use rubber bands and sroketse
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you could do something similar to what our secondary team did.
The flex wheels made it a little faster but it worked without them.
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Depends on the intake type, but most competitive intakes will have two stages, a lower intake and an upper intake, which is usually a hook or a hood. The lower intake uses the small flex wheels, but if you don’t have any you can use the sprocket + rubber bands method from before flex wheels existed. You can find examples of this by searching for robots before 2022.
The upper intake is really up to you guys to decide to either go hook or hood.
Just to add onto this, most preseason over under robots used this, at least those in most popular preseason reveals.
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Also to add on, I would probably not suggest running the hook/hood to directly pick rings off the ground. Our team tried this for our first robot, and it was a nightmare to get the hook to the right height in order to not hit the ground, since the area of the pickup is very small (bottom half of the ring). Furthur, when the robot moves, things on the robot might also move, which could result in the hook touching the ground.
Building off my previous post, heres an image of the mechanism I was talking about.
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My team did a similar intake for our early season Over-Under bot and it works pretty well. One of the only problems was the rubber bands snapped a lot.
Can you send a picture of that intake?
Too add to this, the rubber bands will loose some of their grip as you use them.
you should be able to download the picture…
the only change since then is that we found the larger grey intake wheels to be slightly better
What’s wrong with metal hooks? I don’t have polycarbonate
Just a lot more annoying to tune because you can’t just melt them into the exact shape of the ring. Metal’s probably not too bad if that’s all you have though.
Our intake uses flex wheels, some tank tread chains and plastic carrot shaped flaps.