Hey Yall! my team (3654) is looking for new ideas to help improve our robot’s ball indexer and intake for the 2021 season! we are also looking for new ideas for both low and high goal shooter. what we currently use is a belt system that will carry the balls from our intake and then dump them into the low goal. if anyone has any ideas on how we could improve or add to this system they would be very much appreciated! thank you!
Some pictures of your current set-up would help a ton of you have any! 
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This probably isn’t a super direct answer, but one thing that you could do is look at the reveal video’s of really good robot’s this year and see what types of things they did and how they did them. Another great place to look is the 2020 open build blogs, you will find excellent ideas and practices there you will just need to do some digging. Once you have found a great idea see if you can apply it to your robot. Maybe have a slo-mo video of your robot intaking and indexing and find the slow-points. You may find that your intake rollers/wheels are too close to the ground, or maybe the ball get’s caught on the bumpers so you need to add something there. Those are my 2 cents.
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I thought Team Titanium (1986) had an incredibly impressive bot at #frcmokc
You can get a look at it here: https://youtu.be/L0IrdbzMmBg?t=26
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unfortunately, this is the best image of our robot that really can give you a good idea of our intake and our indexer, if you have any questions let me know
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well for starters it looks like the only thing directing the ball into those belts are those 2x1 bars slanted towards the belts. While this may do something to center the balls Id really recommend either mecanum wheels on your intake or adding a powered system to center the balls a la 1756-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISnO6BCw4w4
well there are pvc plates that prevent the balls from bouncing out and we also have a sensor that will move one ball into the belts at a time
sure, but it seems like your intake is much wider than where the balls need to be to be controlled by the belt that feeds into the shooter, or whatever is at the other end of the belts
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hmm looking at the video you sent i can say that this is something that we did consider but did not add due to time, but now that infinite recharge truly
is infinite I guess it will be something for us to look into more, thank you!
Ayyyy, another member of #AbsurdlyHighSeedingLowGoalGang! Your approach looks a lot like our approach. Some things I observed:
- Correct choice to go beyond the bumpers for intake, but that intake needs something to retain balls and urge them into the belly of the robot. Not sure if that’s an additional spinning shaft, more guards, or something else but you can’t be losing balls like that.
- Why are you trying to index? Go full width the whole way through, the port is more than wide enough. You could space those belts you have out a bit more and be fine. It even works for shooting high, as 1758 demonstrated at Palmetto.
- If you’re going to dump low, you need to get all the balls in and get back to intake. That last match had at least one drop where the ball plopped out from pulling away early. You could use sensors or a webcam to monitor this. We used two closely-spaced motorized drums (we called them Yeet Drums as they could help yeet a ball downfield) to help bunch up balls in our belts as well, which would then urge the balls into the goals.
- In your last match, y’all went for the hang at 50 seconds and spent the better part of ten seconds idle in the rendezvous point. While the bar was super important in the early weeks, you could easily snuck a few more balls in. If you can find ways to start hanging later and still make it, it’ll be to your benefit.
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what’s up with the scoring system on the low goals? It seems like in half of the matches low goals were not counted at Palmetto
If you want to go the easier route, I’d highly recommend getting a GreyT turret and shooter combo. they make good stuff.
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