[pilleya]

For the official season, we used a mini-cim and a 12:1 gear ratio on our stacker. Before our first Off-season event we converted our practise robot into a landfill bot, with a CIM and a 10:1, this was driving a spool and rope to stack, as we had broken the timing belt. We were getting 2 landfill stacks or 2 human player stacks from this robot.

After we saw that a full size CIM would give us extra stacking speed, we upgraded our primary robot to a 10:1 and CIM. At Champs we were putting up 3 HP stacks. In practise for the Chinese Robotics Competition with our rather crude chute mockup(allowed faster feeding of totes) and smooth floor, we were managing to put up 5+ stacks with bins on two of the stacks, legend has it that at in one practise session we put up 6 stacks 2 with bin . However like many things in the 'heat' and pressure of the competition, that number decreased to around 4.

Something else to think about is the use of surgical tubing to assist in the raising of the stacker with a heavy load, it worked great for us this season.