This hopper design provides an all gravity system with no chance of jamming. The size must be adjusted but other than that there are no real problems.
Looks interesting.
Just curious, is there any protection against the balls getting knocked out of the channel (by, say, a good whack from the opposition)?
not quite yet but we made this just yesterday and it needs slight tweaking.
I have one idea to prevent them from getting out, have something above the balls so that if they were knocked, they would hit the top bar, and go back onto the system.
This is true… Thanks for your imput
We’re trying a similar design for our ball holder (the ball trough will wrap around the outside of our robot though, not in a center spiral). We plan on stretching some kind of bungie cords or stretchy tubing over the top to keep them in (that way the top can be moved to remove balls at the end of the match, since you must be able to do this without power).
Is that a prototype or a production piece? Don’t forget the role of fabric as a ball guide. It’s light, cheap and can be installed with wire ties. Nice design – very similar to one of our seeming endless number of prototypes. (Our “storage room” is nearly full of plywood-and-baling-wire prototypes.)
At this point, its a prototype. Our team has decided on just about every design except the hopper and pickup mechanisms. Both essential to the game. This hopper can be made into any relative shape(for space reasons) as long as gravity can power it.
WOW! a Helical hopper MADE OF PVC!!! that is the coolest Robot part i have seen this year, Kudos
That drill there being used to hold the balls from not falling is my favorite part 
Wow that seems like it would really work efficiently. My team came up with something similar, but in order for our other mechanisms to fit, we had to scrap the design 
oh well, I guess its all fine as long as the new design works…
no way
we had the same design in the beginning
that is so crazy
<3
why not use the rubber surgical tubing in the kit?
i don’t understand how you would get the balls up into that contraption… does it rotate?
I’m pretty sure it goes down the contraption.
Yeah, I got that, but how would they be loaded into it? If it’s just a 10-initial-ball-holder, then it’s highly inefficient.
will your hoipper be very accurate because if not, to me, it seems that it will not fall into the path of that. also what are your demnsions of that?
The belt drive i also posted feeds the balls into the top of the hopper. The dimensions may vary from now until later so I cant give you them.
oooooooooooo i like
Coolest looking hopper posted yet (possibly aside of 217’s suspected hopper, but they havnt officially said what their “wheel of doom” is). Simple, efficient, and awesome.
edit: wow, 800th post already!?! :ahh: