HELLPP! El Toro Intake.

[electroken]

Our "El Toro" uses aluminum tube on 16:1 Banebots planetaries with RS-550 motors. It has proven to be extremely reliable and effective. The aluminum tubes are wrapped with rubber tape and capped with a rubber crutch tip.

[Orion.DeYoe]

My team does not use the el torro pickup however there are a few observations that I've made from successful and unsuccessful pickups.
The first thing to remember about this style of pickup is that it does not have very much lifting strength (or any, depending on the design). So your goal is to have the el torro sticks do as little vertical work as possible. This means that the base of the sticks should be as low on the robot as possible. The angle between the sticks and the ground (when looking from the side of the robot) should be as vertical as you can get it (it shouldn't be any lower than 45 degrees as someone has already stated). If your front bumper is greater than 3 inches off the ground then you're going to have a lot of trouble making this pickup work.
The next thing to work on is how far the sticks close together when they're not picking up a ball. I'm assuming they're spring loaded to put pressure on the ball as it travels into the robot (if not then they should be). You're trying to balance the force exerted on the sides of the ball with the difficulty of the el torro sticks "wrapping" around the ball to pick it up. You don't want so much angle and pressure that the sticks just spin on top of the ball and don't pick it up, but you don't want so little that the ball can slip out of your pickup.
Write down a systematic method for testing these things and execute it slowly and make observations for each test (someone taking video with a high-quality phone camera really helps with reviewing results when testing). Only make one change at a time and note the changes in results that you see. Watch videos of other pickups (148 has a really good one, 3847 has one with wheels) on youtube and see what you can learn.
Best of luck!

[Jerry Kempf]

Our team (573) has been using the two spinning stick pickup successfully this year. The basics of our design are: (2) RS775 motors; (2) 5:1 VersaPlanetary gearboxes; (2) ~22 in long Sch 80 1/2" pipes with a tight wrap of the 1/16" by 1" latex rubber from McMaster; laying on top of the bumper (7.5 inches above the floor); with a 30 degree angle when extended; with a powered lift using the AM 42T pulleys, a 15mm Gates belt, and a PG188 gearmotor, and (3) wraps of surgical tubing to pull the stick together. We found the tension of the last item to be important when we helped team 3548 at the Southfield competition.

[ShadathChow]

Originally Posted by Jerry Kempf

Our team (573) has been using the two spinning stick pickup successfully this year. The basics of our design are: (2) RS775 motors; (2) 5:1 VersaPlanetary gearboxes; (2) ~22 in long Sch 80 1/2" pipes with a tight wrap of the 1/16" by 1" latex rubber from McMaster; laying on top of the bumper (7.5 inches above the floor); with a 30 degree angle when extended; with a powered lift using the AM 42T pulleys, a 15mm Gates belt, and a PG188 gearmotor, and (3) wraps of surgical tubing to pull the stick together. We found the tension of the last item to be important when we helped team 3548 at the Southfield competition.

Wow, I saw your ball pick up at Waterford. Thank you for the specific angles, we'll probably be utilizing this on our robot with the rubber from McMaster Carr. Thanks.