I’ve seen many teams discussing how many balls they can shoot in a second. People have been discussing how many balls per second their shooter is capable of, but this statistic is useless unless you build a ball storage unit that is capable of feeding the balls into your shooter at that speed. I have yet to see an efficient ball storage unit that is able to feed a shooter at a fast/consistent rate. Gravity fed ball storage units have been proven pretty much useless (when you are carrying a large amount of balls) because they will get stuck. Other then that, most teams are just mimicking Ri3d teams and just using a little lexan “blender” in the center of their ball storage unit. While this can “un-stuck” the balls, it doesn’t exactly feed them into a shooter and a fast/consistent rate. Using the blender method, the balls just get jumbled around and roll into the shooter randomly. Has anyone’s team designed/built a ball storage unit that is able to feed balls into there shooter at a fast and constant rate yet?
The reason why you probably haven’t seen any good ones is because they are a significant competitive advantage, and teams are probably going to try to keep these things to themselves. :yikes:
Yeah, that’s one of the hidden challenges of this year’s game. We haven’t figured this out completely yet.
Doing gravity feed works ok as long as there’s no bottleneck jam. And as the ball count drops, so does the push to the shooter.
I think a conveyor type system as shown above will be a good efficient method.
due to the vibrations produced by our shooter, a gravity feeder has been quite effective for us
We’ve formed a proprietary concoction of gumball machine spinner technologies. Let me tell you it works very well, but if you go this route be aware that you will need an entire day of fiddling to get it working properly without jams. “With great feed rates come great responsibilities”. 
Video: https://youtu.be/dBlcLLw5o58
As reveal day and competitions approach you will see the feeders that can feed at very fast speeds.
The difference between B(alls)P(er)S(econd) and S(econds)P(er)B(all)
Not as fast as they did in our prototype :’(
More seriously, we have a mechanism for delivering balls from our storage to our shooter that’s neither a Ri3D lexan blender nor gravity-feed. We had the same issue with our shooter where the final version wasn’t working as well as the prototype, but that was fixed with some tuning, so hopefully we’ll get our storage mechanism back up to where we’d like it to be. We’ll post a video of it at some point before competitions start (unless of course we don’t get it up to a sufficient rate; in that case we’ll go hide in a corner and pretend I never posted this).
We’re going for the low goal and not shooting since it fits our team’s resources better, but still had to address this issue. Our goal is to dump 50 balls in less than 3 seconds with no jamming so that we can unload a hopper of balls quickly and move on. We’re filtering the balls down to 4 wide with dividers to keep the balls in lanes at the base layer so that they feed well. Prototypes have worked well and we never had issues with hopper jams, we just have to finish final assembly this weekend so we can make sure the final layout works and tweak as needed. I’ll take video of it working if I can.
Hey, we’re gonna have some pretty similar robots! 
Our club is not shooting. We are using a sweeper to gather fuel very quickly(So fast if we put a ramp on the other end, it would fly across our room, which is a large woodshop). So if the fuel is in the way, we can just sweep it up and get to the gears. This sweeper can also feed shooters at a very fast rate. So we are making our robot so it can become an asset. Also, our gear hopper does not require the pilot to remove it, so we can quickly put gears on if the two pilots are already occupyed.
The link Jacob posted (video by sforbs) appears to showcase a really common but really effective design! You can check out a full-scale version of this by the Secret City Wildbots in our Week Five update at https://youtu.be/QxqL-tZIlus
The shooter-feeding mechanism can be found at around 2:20!