pic: FRC1293's Power Dumper [With video bonus!]

[ttldomination]

Wow...Well...I hope we're with yall and not against yall at palmetto. See yall then.

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[Duncan Macdonald]

Do you have a method to "compact" the balls you store? It looks like all the rollers are powered by one belt.

[Thermal]

Originally Posted by Duncan Macdonald

Do you have a method to "compact" the balls you store? It looks like all the rollers are powered by one belt.

Actually we can hold around 12-16 without compacting. It wasn't our goal to compact. Also yes all of the rollers are powered by 1 chain. The chain just goes from the inside of one sprocket to the outside of another on the way up causing the rollers to go in opposite directions for each other. So far the design is working really really well.

We plan on adding either an optical or sonar type sensor on the intake rollers to ONLY run our manipulator rollers when a ball is picked up to prevent our rollers from running excessively and possibly tearing up the balls.

[Paul Copioli]

I have a stupid question:

How wide are your front two small pieces of drive base? Scaling from the wheel size, it looks like they are only 3 or 4 inches long. How wide will your plywood backing for the bumpers be at those front two spots? Another way to put it is, how wide is your ball intake at the ground?

Paul

[Russ Beavis]

FYI - a 6" bumper plywood backing attached to a 3" metal bar will not pass inspection since it's not supported along its entire length. For example, with a rectangular robot that is the max 28"x38", the opening can be, at most, the length of the edge minus 12". You can build a build that fits in the 28"x38" sizing box at a slight angle and use a marginally larger opening but you'd be building a very thin robot.

If Paul is right and your leading edges are small, the inspectors will give you a hard time and probably ask you to modify your chassis.

Better now than in 2.5 weeks.

Russ Beavis
Chief Inspector

[Thermal]

Our bumpers are 5" wide each at the front, but to make ourselves legal we're bolting a 1' or so long piece of 1010 sized 8020 to the inside of the wheel assemblies giving us another inch on each side.

They look 3-4 inches long only because our flanges bend inwards on the drivetrain sideplates.