Intake systems

[Travis Hoffman]

48's intake wasn't wide at all (alas, it definitely held us back), but the double-sided intake conveyor was plenty fast enough. It was driven by a single RS-550 / 26:1 Banebots P60 combo. I'm still amazed that single motor/gearbox could drive that many polycord belts/rollers so efficiently (upper arm conveyor, figure 8 to lower arm conveyor, lower arm conveyor, and vertical conveyor down into the robot base).

For those not familiar, our 2012 robot's ball intake cage and shooter were part of a pivoting arm. Please see the attached picture.

Our original ball loading position was the arm tilted back to the vertical hard stop (aluminum angle piece with the black velcro rectangle in the pic). After collecting, we would then lower the arm to shooting position. We felt we could do better. We intended to find a solution to let us collect balls in teleop while leaving the arm in the usual front key shot angle, 48 degrees above horizontal (we planned the angle command to work out that way...surrrre).

The challenge to achieving this functionality was that whenever the arm was lowered to shooting positions, a significant air gap appeared between the upper ball conveyor and the motorized intake roller mounted in the robot base. This intake roller was mounted just underneath the hard stop and was necessarily independent from the conveyor belting system due to the changing angle of the arm. Without any improvements, balls being collected inward and upward by the intake roller and the vertical polycord belting could not reach the arm cage when the arm was in a shooting position. So how to bridge this gap?

Originally, we envisioned adding some kind of sliding curved lexan piece between the hard stop (fixed end) and the arm's upper conveyor frame (sliding end) to help divert the balls into the arm's conveyor cage. Ultimately, we found something much lighter and simpler worked great - a quarter-slice of blue (must be blue!) pool noodle velcroed to the vertical hard stop. You can see the strip of blue noodle peeking out on the far side of the stop.

As balls were pushed upward, the pool noodle deflected the path of each ball forward enough to get it to pop into the conveyor cage at any shooting angle we typically used. A simple, lightweight solution that provided a very important piece of additional functionality.

tl;dr - the addition of blue pool noodle backed by Velcro transforms any old fixed-length polycord conveyor system into a "virtual" variable-length system.