Gathering mechanism????
 

my team is thinkin some sort of street sweeping thing.
what are you guys thinkin of to gather balls??

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Magic.

Re: Gathering mechanism????
 

plastic magnets

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Some sort of Conveyor belt. But that's not the whole team, just a couple of us. Not much agreeing going on at this moment.

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I think that using conveyor belts will be an effective way to gather game pieces. Some of the other team members like the idea; in fact, using conveyor belts to gather game pieces was the first thing they thought of.

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by street sweep do you mean like the shooter mech on this robot run in reverse?

http://www.spartonics.org/Spartonics.org/team/06bot.jpg

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Haha yea my team we're thinking of gathering the balls also. We did a prototype with conveyor belts it works ok. I wouldn't say its a great idea though..=/..

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It would be great if teams posted pictures of their 2006 bots for inspiration

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belt/tread or "beater bar" <--figure out what that is you might just like it :)

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Don't forget some motors and stuff, I hear those help

In all seriousness, just look at any intake system from 06, 02 and a few from 01.

Personal favorites: 254/968 from 06 + 111 from 02 + 1114 from 06= Pwnbot

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We're going to try that approach this season. So far, it's failing miserably.

So instead, we are looking at a conveyor-belt, but are still not sure of how or what we're going to launch them with, or if we should just try the store-and-dump approach.

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Buy this book.

It has many of the best robots of Aim High all bound together with lots of great background information on all of them.

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Polycarbonate Rake Of Doom, or P.R.O.D. for short....

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27, 254/968, 1114, 499/70 all had great systems to retreive balls from the floor.

Strange thing is, if you go back and watch '06 games almost ALL of these teams used the human players to fill their robots. It was just quicker and faster than chasing down rolling balls.

And of course there was that one team 25 that never really bothered to pick them up at all... that robot was pretty good ;)

But will human loading be effective in '09?
cons:
-You may score in your own goal.
-You have to not move while being filled.

hmmmm....

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'95's 2002 ball gobbling device is very good.

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One of the best ideas we came up with on kickoff was to have a big black box on the robot, which we run a huge bundle of the wires through. On the box will be a three way switch between 'Magic', 'More Magic', and '???'. EDIT: This box would of course do nothing.

As far as gathering balls goes, we prototyped a spinning bar with little sticks sticking out, grabbing the balls in through the holes. This worked well, and rarely repelled the ball, hitting it in the wrong spot.

Does anybody else really like these balls? I think they make a pretty fantastic game piece. Beats 08 and 06 for sure. I admit ours has broken, but the average field ball won't have gone through nearly as much abuse as this one has.. :eek:

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Holy.........:yikes:

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I like that idea. Do it! (might want to put it on the OI, otherwise it's dead weight...)

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That term came up in discussion yesterday. I think it was related to the switch on the appliance in Spaceballs

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Velcro... wow i can't belive i the first to think of this...:)

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we are either going to make a "wild time orbit ball" snowblower robot
*~or~*
make a robot combine that harvests balls like corn and shoots em out
*~or~*
slanted conveyor to the motorized accelerated dump system
*~or~* . . . . . (my favorite idea)
use that magic to make a UFO with scotty in it that beams up the balls and dumps them into the opponents trailers... oh and our trailer will be 20 feet above the arena floor with us because the magic force field helps it hover
*~or~* . . . . (similar to the last idea)
we steal the flying nimbus from goku and use it to fly the robot around and drop balls from the sky (hopefully we make it away before goku kills us)

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I've said it before . .

Wormholes.

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Wormholes? o...k...

I think the conveyor belt idea is really good, just the situation of getting the balls out of it with the bot off will be harder, unless you have some way of getting them out, wouldnt it be just a bit illegal?

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we were think the same thing but like a bubble gum machine in the opposite direction

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Velcro is illegal because it will ruin the field piece and according to <G29>
Bolding my do... for help

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my own personal design would be. hooks dragging ball into conveyer belts which leed upto wheels which blast the balls out. simple and effective. SIMPLE!!!!!!! lol well simplicity is key

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A reverse bubblegum machine? Hmm... interesting...

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My team (967) was discussing conveyor belts and hit a bump (hehe).

Assuming that you use something to get the ball onto the belt (i.e. combine), how do you have your belt(s) arranged? We were thinking more of a U-shape, with the belt starting on the bottom front and ending at the top front, but how do you get the ball to go through such tight corners and minimizing the number of belts (K.I.S.S).

Would someone share an idea?

EDIT: Also, anyone know how 95 made their robot? (please spare me from the magic spiel, I know for a fact that they only hired one warlock in contrast to our Supreme Mugwump)

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no kidding

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Team 1511 has finished its design analysis this evening and will be using a tractor beam to gather the balls! Good luck everyone! :)

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I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that it had a drum that spun really, really fast. Then, when the drum touched the ball it was shot up into the hopper.

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Other designs considered:

• Lure the balls into the hopper using tiny plastic carrots

• Scare them in by making a scary face and having an audio speaker quietly whisper BOO! in their ears

• Lure them in with the promise of a "fun orbit ball party" complete with sweet rave music and glowing sweat

• Use the Aperture Science portal gun

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The words "95's ball gobbling" link to the movie of the bot and "device" links to a picture of the instrument used (rollers).

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Today we made an excellent belt/roller gathering prototype as well as a huge paddle

I'm leaning towards a belt/roller system to get the balls off the ground and into our ball "hopper" to get shot

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Last night we experimented with conveyor belts a bit. We'll probably use one of two ways to do it, with adjustments made later:

1.) Surgical tubing
2.) Rubber mesh used in VEX, in conjuntion with solid rubber hose that will be sewn to it, laying flat against the mesh but perpendicular to the way the ball moves. The layout is similar to a rock/gravel conveyor, but everything's allowed to flex in order to form to the ball for better grip.

One thing we haven't nailed down yet -- has anyone figured out an effective compression on the balls so that there's minimal slip yet it doesn't deform the ball too much? We're thinking about spacing our conveyors 8" apart so the ball exerts some force back on the belts for traction, and then the ball will sort of 'pop' out at the top...but we have yet to test that.

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Yup. Belts and rollers, driven by pulleys (supplied by New Hampshire Industries, aka NHpulleys.com, our host for several years).

That mechanism has served team 95 very, very well. Variants of it were used on our 1998 (Grace), 2002 (Feynman), 2004 (Da Vinci)[*], and 2006 (Lilly)[*] robots. 2004 and 2006 could disgorge as well as gobble balls. 2002 was definitely the coolest one (since the balls were lined up), but Da Vinci was probably the best overall mechanism (it reliably and quickly could suck up balls and disgorge them without jamming, and we regularly did well during matches by simply depriving the other side from having balls).

[*] Palmetto regional Silver winners... :)

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We were alliance partners at Palmetto in 2006. My son, who was 9 at the time still talks about that shooter!

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Put a stick inside the ball, inflate a balloon on the end of the stick, take it where you want, then deflate the balloon.

Joey

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The Skunkworks is planning on using the power of stench to herd the balls into the airlock... Hmm, perhaps we can use this to the same affect against opposing drivers... But, if we can't stink it up enough, we'll resort to gerbil powered super rollers!

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yes... you out one end inside the hopper and aim the other one on the floor below the orbit balls! But what happens if you drive into the floor portal...:eek: