Has anyone tried an Archimedes screw for intake roller, to help guide the Power Cells toward the center?
I know some teams have had success with small mecanum wheels, but 3D-printed mecanums seem to be delicate. A 3D-printed screw would be pretty robust; having no moving parts.
It may work in theory, but I’d be skeptical that it would work in practice. Especially with these balls being as sticky as they are, I think a screw-type intake would just pick up the ball rather than rolling it sideways. You’re more than welcome to prototype one though, and if it does work I’m sure people on here would be interested in seeing a video and hearing the details.
I really really hope someone makes a successful timing screw indexing mechanism.
The engineering behind this…
I just want the machine that can make the screws shown in that video.
125 did this in 2016.
It did the job, but I would recommend just using a printed mecanum wheel. 125 has been very happy with ours.
A 3D Printer or CNC probably
I would tend to assume CNC, though I guess a large 3D printer could produce this these days. Currently the team has neither, though a couple of the students have smaller 3D printers and have been printing parts for the team.
You don’t even need to make it all in one piece - a small version of either machine could do it. Just cad it and split it up into segments!
These screws are generally made on a CNC 4-axis mill. My company uses these in various applications and they work very well for objects that are rather rigid and have at least two differing dimensions.
We’re currently using them on an application with a certain popular chocolate manufacturer for their mould trays, and have also used them extensively with a certain popular brand of soup for transporting their cans. They are incredibly neat and mesmerizing mechanisms. The capability of them to both reorient and merge at the same time is heavily coveted in the material handling world.
Below is a picture of some test pieces we had made for the chocolate application.
For the most part, 2" 3D printed mecanums should hold up fine on intakes this year. I would still recommend that teams keep a few extra at competitions in case they break one or two in a hit.
Would highly recommend a crash bar that leads ahead of the intake roller for any style of intake this year. If the mecanum wheels are the first thing to contact an opponent robot, you’re playing a dangerous game. It’s not too hard to add a solid bar slightly forward and above your intake roller to take the brunt of impacts.
This is exactly what we did last fall - we were doing some improvements to our SteamWorks robot, and that included a new indexing system. Got 1 full revolution of the screw in each print, with a correctly sized hex in the middle. That let us make sure things were oriented correctly when assembling!
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