Conveyor Belt
 

What type of belts would be good for a conveyor system

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

I'm sure there's a number of ways you could do it, but the easiest to do (probably) would be just "standard" treadmill/conveyer belt material... I don't know what it's called but it's almost always the same kinda stuff -- this black cloth/hard rubber material covered in tiny divots for traction.

This kinda stuff:

http://www.made-in-china.com/image/2...-Polishing.jpg


You could always get more complex and do a series of thinner belts, use cloth, etc, but your best bet's probably just that "standard" material imo. Seemed to work pretty well on our '06 bot.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Use the surgical tubing that came with the robotics kit! Its extremely light and effective...

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I have also heard of teams using round belting.

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Look up round urethane belting on mcmaster. This is what we are planning to use. It's nice because you can make any length belt you choose and it's pretty cheap.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

They question is.... is it a little over kill? And how much weight will it cost? The belts from conveyor belts from mc master in my concern would be too "industrial" for our needs. Any have any other ideas for something like surgical tubing, but better friction?

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We've been looking at pictures and descriptions of a lot of 2006 robots, and there seem to be several ways to move balls without using a conventional conveyor system. Archimedes was onto something....

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Actual conveyor belting is a bad idea. It's a flat belt, so it's much more difficult to get it to ride true than a round belt or V-belt or something. You'll need crowned pulleys to have reasonable odds of keeping it on, but that's dependent on how well aligned the pulleys are. If they're too far our of parallel with each other, the belt is inevitably going to walk to one side or another. They're just generally harder to get working than the round urethane belting. Which is why you see so many teams running the urethane belts.

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My team's experience in 2006 supports what Kevin said above. We had a sponsor that donated materials for a flat belt system to elevate Poof balls to our shooter. The elevator worked well, except when it got out of alignment, lost tension, or slipped a belt. It did those things often enough to make our shooter ineffective in many matches.

I recommend using solid round conveyor belting.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

In 06' 1741 used actual conveyor belting to pick up the poof balls and it worked wonderfully. The only problem was that it captured the balls so well one of our team members would usually have to help the field reset crew remove them. In the off season 06'-07' we modified the conveyor system to use industrial flat rubber bands and that worked just as effectively, but allowed us to cut our robot weight by nearly 10 pounds and sped up the pick up a great deal. The pickup was driven by both FP motors with the gear box. I would highly suggest a conveyor this year simply because it takes up less space than a screw type lift and it has the capability of picking up 2 balls at a time. Whereas, in other lifts you are limited to only one ball at a time. Also an interesting observation on the bands. The rollers at each end of the conveyor were made out of 3" PVC pipe with a cap on each end and rings of larger PVC glued in place to create ridges and valleys, our intent being for the bands to ride in the valleys, but they did the exact opposite. The bands tracked to the high points and stayed there quite nicely.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Something we have noticed about the orbit balls is that they are very springy.

If you choose to use a belt, it should be set up in such a way that it applys a good deal of force on the ball to lift it.

If your belts are too springy the balls will slip when they reach the median point between the rollers.

We've been considering using a single high tension belt, like what many teams use in their treads.



This pic , from team 45's '03 bot, is what we really want to use. Does anyone know where they got it? F.N. Sheppard, Bercoflex?

F.N. Sheppard also has these really cool "profile" timing belts that could be used as scoops to lift the balls (instead of rolling them up a channel).

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

this http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10051&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100388913&marketID=93& locStoreNum=1278&categoryID=525742 works well you just need to sew in to a belt and work on make it to make it track well

pm for details

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

This is exactly what flat belts do, and why they can be so problematic if you're not being extremely careful with them. Flat belts will always track to the highest point of a pulley if it's at all possible for them to do so. This means that if your pulleys aren't parallel, the belt will track to the high side of the pulley. Crowning the pulley can help with this, but not if your alignment is bad enough that a "low" side of the crown is still higher than anything else. This is also why losing tension can cause belts to ride side to side or ride up onto flanges. They're all somewhat elastic, so if there's enough stretch in them to start riding up on a flange, they'll happily do so and will soon be attempting to ride on the flange itself.

I'm not saying it's not possible to be successful with them, mind. Just that it requires a certain attention to detail.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

We're planning on being able to pick up two balls at once, and feed them into a screw lift. This design details are still vaporware :)

The screw lift does take up a lot of room, but most of that room is used to store balls, so it's not wasted.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

We tried to make a screw lift in 2006 and it didn't work out for us. I kind of hope we can at least get a good prototype this year because I think they look really cool.

In our final 2006 design, we used a conveyor belt from flat conveyor material that was very effective. We used pvc pipe (with many "speed holes") with end caps for the rollers. We could pick up balls really well with it, and fairly easily get two balls side by side. (Unfortunately the shooting was not so good...) That said, a preliminary hand powered prototype vertical conveyor with four strands of surgical tubing worked pretty well lifting the orbit balls up 3 feet last night. One key is having a good surface opposite the conveyor to help maintain the force on the balls. The conveyor worked well enough that the render of the robot with the conveyor is still hanging on my classroom wall.

Another thing to watch out for the conveyor mangling the balls if they stay and and get pulled back down. In 2006 we would occasionally pull the balls through a 2 cm opening between the conveyor and the chassis if the hopper was full. That would probably destroy the orbit balls.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Anybody know how to go about shortening and reataching a treadmill belt??
Thanks
Bruce

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Ah, the designs my former team has produced for a screw type lift only accommodate one ball. What are you planning on driving it with?

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

anyone have any pictures of a ball lift mechanism?

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I know that in 2006, my team used a conveyor belt to bring the balls up to a launcher. We used a conveyor belt at the top and guide rails at the bottom. I heard that it worked very well.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Im confused on how you would do this

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The screw is VERY large! and it's not the part that turns.

Our web page has some pictures of the prototype.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Any suggestions on fattening up the center of a PVC pipe to drive a belt?
We intend to use 2 1/2 ID PVC with guides on the way up, aprox 30" long total. The alignment issue is controlled by two eyebolts at the top and a very rigid frame.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Maybe you could thin down the edges instead? run the motor that drives the pipe, and hold a file on it. Should only take a day or two to get the profile you want :)

Or if you can find thin sheet PVC material you could glue on strips of it.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

There are certain materials that we have discovered to grip orbitballs extremely well..... (a little hint: bedroom would be incomplete without a dresser that can hold clothes in place....) My advice if you cant figure this out, is to bring an orbitball on a date to a hardware store an run it through any materials.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Im looking for some urethane belting material and am trying to find a cost effective way of bonding the stuff. Anyone have any ideas?

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Does it need to be urethane, or would something like neoprene work? You might experiment with some Pliobond contact cement.

http://www.mcmaster.com/#conveyor-belts/=fxqrh

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Check out this thread:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...light=polycord

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

It's kinda funny how things work out.

In the last 3 weeks we've tried everything we read on these forums, and it was always one thing or another that went wrong. Finally, last night we came up with our own solution to this that hasn't been suggested on these forums. What we found left some black residue behind, so once we test 2 more materials that are coming in Thursday I'll post what we've done. I knew once I found this stuff when spelunking through TrueValue in Week 2 that we should have used it right away, but alas I'm not the only one on the team.

My tip: stay away from Lowe's and Home Depot when in a search of local hardware stores; they're too big and you'll spend way too much time looking for the right thing. Start with the mom and pop shops that are small and have everything closer together without all of the non-relevant items in between them. On top of that, usually you can touch/sample a material without opening an entire box. Then, once you have an idea of what you want, purchase the sample and test on the prototype.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

We are trying to use the surgical tubing is there an easy way to connect the ends so that they don't come apart during competition?

Your answer is most appreciated!!

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

We have used a conveyor belt material manufactured by Intralox. It comes in multiple widths and uses a variety of sprocket diameters.

http://www.intralox.com/

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Great advice! I love looking at what the locally owned/operated Ace hardware store has on the shelves. They even got in some really nice Baltic Birch plywood, just in time for our final chassis build

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We are having some great success with our conveyor which we constructed a belt from a plastic carpet runner cut down to size and riveted together so that the knubby side is out... ours works great with one bottom belt running on smooth bearing rollers (the drive roller has a pool noodle glued to it) and the other surface that the ball contacts on the top of the ball is simply a piece of a flat foam PVC panel with the anti-slip mat glued to it...

Our conveyor is driven very fast by a modified FP motor which I detialed in another post:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...t=72513&page=2

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

I'm not sure exactly what it is you are using, but if it is hollow they make barbed connectors that the tubing slides onto either end of. They are extremely strong: it took another mentor and I to pull it apart. If it is polycord they sell the welding kit, but that is $300, so it isn't terribly cost effective.

Best of luck

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Yesterday we got in our two test materials, and they work like a charm when used together. I will say that we don't intend for our conveyor to go extremely fast like some people have posted, so YMMV for this setup.

The first is a nylon mesh, with tiny holes. With a belt that's 6" wide, this stuff simply does not break. After putting a sample in the vise and yanking on it, and on two glued pieces, all we found was that we were getting more and more tired of trying to break the stuff. It showed no signs of fatigue, neither on the material nor on the glued join. However, it does not grip the ball like I though it would.

The second material is a neoprene mesh. It turns out that the mesh has 'teeth' that grip the ball ridiculously well in one direction, yet it has a worse grip than the nylon in the other direction...I wonder what we can use that for... It's downside is that it is extremely fragile.

But combine the two with some hot glue... and BAM a ridiculously strong, flexible, lightweight belt that is cheap ($40) and easy to make (don't stretch the neoprene when bonding the two though!). We also have a small sample of the two materials expoxied together, so tomorrow we'll see how well that worked out.

/edit
I should also add that we're using this material as a tread to drive the belt.

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

we're doing a conveyor belt design and i need to know what kind of motor would be best for a conveyor belt?

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

I hate to put it like this, but the answer is: it depends.

For our conveyor, we're using only 1 window motor. With our roller, it gets the balls through 40" of conveyor in 5 seconds. This is acceptable to us, as the motor has more than enough torque and the speed is 'fast enough'. We also are trying to conserve weight, so more motors are impractical right now. (Our drive train + pneumatics + electronics board came in at 65 lbs :ahh:)

Re: Conveyor Belt
 

Actually, you can just melt the ends with a butane lighter or a heat gun and stick them together in a piece of angle to bond them. You can trim off the excess urethane around the bond afterwards. We have 8 of these belts on our robot, each with 10 percent stretch or greater and I don't think we'll have them fail any time soon. A tip is to cut the belting at 45 degree angles to have a greater surface area on your bond.

-Vivek