Hopper Capacity

[Veselin Kolev]

You can easily get all the balls. Just imagine... at the start of the round there are 60 balls (10 in each robot) on the field and 20 in the human stations. The robots shoot or dump them, and eventually the balls end up in the human player's hands, and are then thrown back onto the field. Every single ball will probably at one point be rolling around on the ground. And at that moment, a robot with a huge ball capacity goes up and eats it. Hence, you can get all the balls if you are VERY VERY lucky. Or if you just EMP the other robots. But thats not ok last time I checked.

My prediction is that if a team tries hard enough, they can probably get half the balls.

[RebelWithARobot]

In response to being able to shoot 30-40 balls...

Our robot fires between 8 and 10 balls per second with 90-100% accuracy. If we could hold 30-40 balls we'd be in good shape, currently we only hold 20, but we're working on it.

Looking forward to seeing all the rookies at St. Charles. Heads Up B.E.A.S.T!!!

[Gene F]

Originally Posted by Nimmy

I would love to see those who voted 70-all
is that even physically possible considering the size of the ball?

Yes! it is possible. The ball is about 7 inches. A cube that would hold the ball would have a volume of 7^3 or 343 cubic inches. The volume allowed for the robot is 60X60X60 inches. That is 216000 cubic inches. 343 into 216000 is just over 629. If the robot didn't expand the volume would be 64904 cubic inches. Divide that by 343 and you get 189. Collecting all the balls would still leave about half the volume for other robot parts!

Brought to you by a member of team 343 (7^3).

[KORN_lover_2007]

Wow. If I see a functional robot that can hold all the balls and score points, I will be amazed. I know our robot can pick up two balls at a time from the ground, and I think she is supposed to be able to hold ten balls at a time, but don't quote me on that. This is going to be quite an interesting competition this year....

[irishninja]

We've made a spiral to hold all our balls for us, and we debated how big it should be. We thought we would never need more than 30, so thats how big we made it.

[Steve S.]

we dont have a hopper, but our conveyor can hold 10

[Tom Bottiglieri]

We can hold all the balls, but we will never need to. I guess its just another one of our over kill designs.

[Tim566]

I am fairly certain our robot can hold around 25 balls maybe even 35. we didn't have nearly that many balls so we weren't entirely sure but from our estimate it appears to hold about 25 but then again we may have misjudged(25 is probably too low)

[s_forbes]

We only had 25 or so balls to play with, and we could almost fill up our hopper half way! The best part was seeing them all come out in 2 or 3 seconds...

[gondorf]

our robot can hold up to 20 balls if it is filled. after that it jams.


100th post yay!!!!!

[Pjohn1959]

Our robot has held all 60 balls that we bought, and still has room for 20 to 30 more. Since we do not have a shooter, we have more room for storage. Its just a giant box mounted on top of our drive unit.

[Elgin Clock]

Originally Posted by Gene F

Yes! it is possible. The ball is about 7 inches. A cube that would hold the ball would have a volume of 7^3 or 343 cubic inches. The volume allowed for the robot is 60X60X60 inches. That is 216000 cubic inches. 343 into 216000 is just over 629. If the robot didn't expand the volume would be 64904 cubic inches. Divide that by 343 and you get 189. Collecting all the balls would still leave about half the volume for other robot parts!

Brought to you by a member of team 343 (7^3).

Actually.. well.. yeah.. sure... You may be right. I fit 149 in this configuration here - Minus gravity of course.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...&postcount=101

Oh, and as far as my stance on this thread in general, Hoppers are way overrated for the simple fact that they have potential for jamming.

[lukevanoort]

We have a switchback magazine/hopper design (it has metal bars in a sort of Z configuration) that can hold ~8, our conveyor can hold ~4 and another ~6 or so can go on top. These are all estimates based on a mentor's CAD of the robot, which I have evidence to distrust. We couldn't test them before ship b/c we have only three balls. My more realistic (I think) count from eyballing is ~5 in the hopper thing, four on top and five in the conveyor. Still, we figure since the opposing team's human player isn't going to throw US the ball, more would be excessive. (I wanted ~20, but this should work... I hope)

[Barry Bonzack]

1604 has held up to 24 balls and wasn't even half full. We can pick balls up from the ground, but I can only really see us getting lots of balls if we fill it up while the robot is on our side of the field during defense period. I don't see picking up balls as good of a strategy as playing defense, but I may be wrong. Being able to control all balls on the field so the opponents can't score may turn out to be a better strategy, but we shall see.

1390 can hold 10 balls in its conveyor belt at max capacity.



Quick funny story on balls in the 1604 hopper... We were weighing it on a scale at the school one day. It came up to be 24.1 lbs. Baffled, I tried to think of everything we have added on to the robot since the last time we weighed it. One of the students looked up and asked "Do the balls make a difference?" I look up "uhhh oh yeah, Yes!" after removing about 8 of them, we were back down to 118 lbs.

[rjp744]

Originally Posted by Alekat

Where does that logic come from? I think if you can handle more than twenty go for it.

Also, depending on your drivetrain and your turning ability the extra weight of several balls could help considerably.