1425 Error Code Xero is proud to present our 2020 robot, Spitfire.
https://youtu.be/5pRo3krE8qY[Reveal Video]
We will be competing this weekend at Clackamas and week 3 Wilsonville.
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Yup, 1425 is gonna kick butt like usual
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Have any issues with the orange belts falling off? Or the balls jamming in the intake?
We have had some issues with the orange belts falling off however it is usually fixed with tighter belts and deeper pulleys.
We also had some problems with balls not smoothly going between the intake and conveyor. We fixed this by adding fangs on the intake to direct the ball backwards. The intake itself does not jam.
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What about when your intake is full? Our intake is similar to yours but it jams when the balls hit the stop right before the shooter. Maybe our belt compression is too tight?
You said the stop before the shooter. If I understand correctly, you continuously run the conveyor and have a stop at the back as balls are collected. You are having problems that the belts come off as they run on the stationary ball before the shooter.
We have sensors along the conveyor and we sequence them as the come in, one after the other. We don’t have a stop before the shooter and don’t continually run the conveyor.
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Oh, Gotcha. I see, thats the problem we’re running into
At this point, if 2910, 4911, and 1425 are on the field together our scouts might just throw a fit.
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Every day I get more scared for Clackams
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To add more detail, there is a horizontal belt that stages four of the balls. There is a near vertical belt that stages the fifth ball. There are four independent through beam sensors to detect balls at various locations. A member of the software team spent days now in total on the sequencing between the intake and the conveyor belts to get it to collect, transport, shoot, and eject five balls reliably. There is a software finite state machine that contains over fifty states across five distinct operations to make it work.
Yesss #translatorclimbgang
This looks really solid! I was wondering if you could explain how your magazine works mechanically. It seems to work very fast and reliably.
I’m interested as well. How do you keep the balls in your magazine from jamming, is the ball run by belts on the top and bottom or just the top?
There are belts top and bottom, and they move at the same speed. This means that the balls don’t have to rotate relative to each other to advance, whch bypasses one likely source of jams.
There is a mixture of round and flat belts. The main section is round, and there are flat belts as you approach the turret. The round belts are running on 1-3/4" diameter pulleys, which is slightly smaller than the manufacturer’s recommendations. The flat belts are also running on custom 3d printed crown pulleys although I don’t have the dimensions offhand. One Neo motor and a custom gearbox drives the main sections. A timing belt connects the top and bottom. There is a small section at the end that rotates with the turret and is independently controlled.
The real trick with this conveyor is to intake the balls without gaps between them because once the balls are in they’re basically going to stay the same distance apart. Running this manually it would be essentially impossible to get all five balls. If you look closely, you may see that there is a very large number locations which are the right size for a sensor. If you attempt to build something of this style, I would recommend doing that so that you can experiment with where the sensors need to go without drilling more holes each time.
Wow thanks so much for this info! This is really good stuff to know. I was curious as to what made you choose flat belting in some areas versus the round belting. I also wanted to know how you got the balls so tight. Where exactly in your tract did u place the sensors? (I could not find one of them). Do you have the link to the sensors you used?
Distance between the two pulleys left to right is 2.5 inches.
Distance between the two pulleys top to bottom is 7.5 inches.
.25 in poly cord rides in a groove with an OD of 1.25 in.
3/8 in hex shaft was used on the back three shafts as they do not transmit power. Front two shafts that transmit power are 1/2 in hex.
All shafts use 3D printed spacers instead of shaft collars as they will never slide. around.
Two side plates are 1/8 in poly carb. Additional 1/8 in aluminum is used to support the bearings and provide more rigidity.
We put in a special spaced hole pattern to allow for very fine adjustment of sensors.
The main thing we learned from our V1 conveyor was that you need the entrance low enough to the ground that the hand off from intake to conveyor is smooth.
Feel free to ask any other questions about the conveyor or the robot.
-Daniel Kassab, Driver/design 1425
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