anyone have any pictures of a ball lift mechanism?
I know that in 2006, my team used a conveyor belt to bring the balls up to a launcher. We used a conveyor belt at the top and guide rails at the bottom. I heard that it worked very well.
Im confused on how you would do this
The screw is VERY large! and it’s not the part that turns.
Our web page has some pictures of the prototype.
Any suggestions on fattening up the center of a PVC pipe to drive a belt?
We intend to use 2 1/2 ID PVC with guides on the way up, aprox 30" long total. The alignment issue is controlled by two eyebolts at the top and a very rigid frame.
Maybe you could thin down the edges instead? run the motor that drives the pipe, and hold a file on it. Should only take a day or two to get the profile you want 
Or if you can find thin sheet PVC material you could glue on strips of it.
There are certain materials that we have discovered to grip orbitballs extremely well… (a little hint: bedroom would be incomplete without a dresser that can hold clothes in place…) My advice if you cant figure this out, is to bring an orbitball on a date to a hardware store an run it through any materials.
Im looking for some urethane belting material and am trying to find a cost effective way of bonding the stuff. Anyone have any ideas?
Does it need to be urethane, or would something like neoprene work? You might experiment with some Pliobond contact cement.
It’s kinda funny how things work out.
In the last 3 weeks we’ve tried everything we read on these forums, and it was always one thing or another that went wrong. Finally, last night we came up with our own solution to this that hasn’t been suggested on these forums. What we found left some black residue behind, so once we test 2 more materials that are coming in Thursday I’ll post what we’ve done. I knew once I found this stuff when spelunking through TrueValue in Week 2 that we should have used it right away, but alas I’m not the only one on the team.
My tip: stay away from Lowe’s and Home Depot when in a search of local hardware stores; they’re too big and you’ll spend way too much time looking for the right thing. Start with the mom and pop shops that are small and have everything closer together without all of the non-relevant items in between them. On top of that, usually you can touch/sample a material without opening an entire box. Then, once you have an idea of what you want, purchase the sample and test on the prototype.
We are trying to use the surgical tubing is there an easy way to connect the ends so that they don’t come apart during competition?
Your answer is most appreciated!!
We have used a conveyor belt material manufactured by Intralox. It comes in multiple widths and uses a variety of sprocket diameters.
Great advice! I love looking at what the locally owned/operated Ace hardware store has on the shelves. They even got in some really nice Baltic Birch plywood, just in time for our final chassis build
We are having some great success with our conveyor which we constructed a belt from a plastic carpet runner cut down to size and riveted together so that the knubby side is out… ours works great with one bottom belt running on smooth bearing rollers (the drive roller has a pool noodle glued to it) and the other surface that the ball contacts on the top of the ball is simply a piece of a flat foam PVC panel with the anti-slip mat glued to it…
Our conveyor is driven very fast by a modified FP motor which I detialed in another post:
I’m not sure exactly what it is you are using, but if it is hollow they make barbed connectors that the tubing slides onto either end of. They are extremely strong: it took another mentor and I to pull it apart. If it is polycord they sell the welding kit, but that is $300, so it isn’t terribly cost effective.
Best of luck
Yesterday we got in our two test materials, and they work like a charm when used together. I will say that we don’t intend for our conveyor to go extremely fast like some people have posted, so YMMV for this setup.
The first is a nylon mesh, with tiny holes. With a belt that’s 6" wide, this stuff simply does not break. After putting a sample in the vise and yanking on it, and on two glued pieces, all we found was that we were getting more and more tired of trying to break the stuff. It showed no signs of fatigue, neither on the material nor on the glued join. However, it does not grip the ball like I though it would.
The second material is a neoprene mesh. It turns out that the mesh has ‘teeth’ that grip the ball ridiculously well in one direction, yet it has a worse grip than the nylon in the other direction…I wonder what we can use that for… It’s downside is that it is extremely fragile.
But combine the two with some hot glue… and BAM a ridiculously strong, flexible, lightweight belt that is cheap ($40) and easy to make (don’t stretch the neoprene when bonding the two though!). We also have a small sample of the two materials expoxied together, so tomorrow we’ll see how well that worked out.
/edit
I should also add that we’re using this material as a tread to drive the belt.
we’re doing a conveyor belt design and i need to know what kind of motor would be best for a conveyor belt?
I hate to put it like this, but the answer is: it depends.
For our conveyor, we’re using only 1 window motor. With our roller, it gets the balls through 40" of conveyor in 5 seconds. This is acceptable to us, as the motor has more than enough torque and the speed is ‘fast enough’. We also are trying to conserve weight, so more motors are impractical right now. (Our drive train + pneumatics + electronics board came in at 65 lbs :ahh:)
Actually, you can just melt the ends with a butane lighter or a heat gun and stick them together in a piece of angle to bond them. You can trim off the excess urethane around the bond afterwards. We have 8 of these belts on our robot, each with 10 percent stretch or greater and I don’t think we’ll have them fail any time soon. A tip is to cut the belting at 45 degree angles to have a greater surface area on your bond.
-Vivek