hopper or magazine

[ewankoff]

last night at our team meeting we discussed two completly diffrent ball collection methods. either a hopper or a magazine

the hoper would have the balls conveyed to them
and the magazine would collect the balls and they would be pushed up to the ball feed.

each would have the appropriate belts and things

[Kelvin Ng]

what is a magazine? i'm still thinking the kind with words and pictures.

[ewankoff]

Originally Posted by Kelvin Ng

what is a magazine? i'm still thinking the kind with words and pictures.

like the clip on a gun

[greencactus3]

Originally Posted by ewankoff

like the clip on a gun

but you cant change the magazine out to a full clip can you?

[John Gutmann]

They are kinda the same thing. almost, It is in how you apply their usage.

If you have a hopper then you need some way to feed the balls into the barrel, which means it need to do it pretty accuratley.

So if you use a magezine you could have the hopper feed them into the magezine so they are ready for a quick burst of shots.

You don't even need something enclosed, just an inclined plane that feeds into the barrel.

But as for choosing one....

I would say hopper because how would you use just a magezine efficently? I can see possible ways but in my opinion they wouldn't be worth it.

Remember KISS.

[sciencenerd]

Ok, I'm pretty sure I know what ewankoff is talking about, so I will clarify (if I get it wrong, just let me know).

The question is: What method does your robot use to store balls?

There are two answers in this poll:
1. A hopper. This is basically any container that holds balls, presumably used in conjunction with other mechanisms that will load balls into it/unload balls from it. Usually gravity is used to unload balls from a system like this into the release mechanism. I suspect most teams will have a system like this.

2. A magazine. This is a container that, once filled with balls, will actively unload them. It would probably be something like a tube that balls can be pushed into, with a spring to push them back out into the release mechanism.

Personally, I think this poll is a little too limited. Judging from previous years involving balls, most teams use a hopper-like device (if they stored balls at all). And while a magazine is a particular solution, there are many others that I believe will be just as (un)common. Just my opinion.

[Andy A.]

A hopper is a bucket you dump stuff into.

A magazine is a hopper with organization. Instead of just getting dumped into a bucket, the balls are placed into a tube one on top of another so they stay organized and could be fed into a mechanism, like a gun, in a controlled fashion. The tube magazine is just an example.

Another example; A paintball gun has a hopper that you dump balls into. typically, the hopper sits over the firing mechanism of the gun, and gravity feeds the balls through a tube into the chamber. In a modern rifle, bullets are usually placed below the firing mechanism in a 'box magazine. The magazine, sometimes called a clip, is spring loaded and forces the bullets up to the top of the box where the gun then grabs them and moves them to the chamber.

The hopper works for the paintball gun because the paint balls are small and spherical, so theres no wrong way for them to enter the chamber. A bullet is very different in that it is an odd shape, and it has to remain in a very fixed orientation, or things go boom in a bad way. In fact, poorly made magazines can cause guns to jam easily, since a bullet may not be in exactly the right position when the receiver goes to extract it from the magazine.

So I guess the real question is, how organized do you plan on keeping the balls in your 'bot?

[Kelvin Ng]

=) thank you, all. Hoppers would probably be best for unloading into the corner goals (or for any other reason). As for shooting, magazines might be best, because you'd need to control the flow of balls so your launching system doesn't jam/misfire. I'm going to predict:

teams that use:

hoppers are generally ball unloaders
magazines are generally shooting/gathering bots
so i guess hybrids are both! =)

[Rickertsen2]

I think maybue ewankoff is asking whether or not your means of ball storage involves a jumbled basket of balls or and indexing mechanism of some sort that holds them tightly ready to feed them to your launcher

[Veselin Kolev]

In my dictionary, a hopper is a gravity powered shoot that lets only one ball drop through at a time. A magazine is a mechanism that does not rely on gravity to do this. With a magazine, you can control load rate, etc...

It also depends on where the "cannon" is on your robot. If it is on top, you probably can't use a hopper to load it (as gravity is a downward force... usually...) so you would have to use a powered magazine. Another reason you may want to use a magazine is to ultimately prevent balls from jamming in your robot, you just have a single row magazine that makes the balls form a single file line.

However if your cannon is at the base of your robot, a hopper is safe to use, as long as you design one that can't easily jam. And hoppers are a lot easier to make.

EDIT: you can have gravity powered magazines. It's just a magazine that is flipped upside down. No kidding, gravity can be useful... this is new.