Today’s post covers are analysis of cube intakes and lists out a lot of requirements and variables we believe will make a world class intake.
Posts will continue through out the season.
CAD Releases
There isn’t much here yet, however through out the season we will add CAD to the partner space for our robot here. Much of this will be drafts or unfinished items, but we’ll also get our production robot items uploaded as well.
Why do you need the uppermost green belt? It seems redundant as you are already driving the second set of pulleys through the red and lower green belt. Is the belt in order to provide a moving surface in the corners of the intake?
A 3D view would probably help:
The outside fingers get actuated in and out to change the width of the intake. The green belts act similarly to a 4 bar linkage, and maintain the orientation of the fingers perpendicular to motor plate while they move in and out. Those pulleys with the green belts are only attached to the plates, the shafts spin inside them. Having them top and bottom is to compensate for the lack of rigid mechanical connection between the top and bottom plates. With only one side, only bending torque through the bearing keeps the other side in place.
It is pretty poorly done, as it’s just enough for us to build it, some of the mirrored parts didn’t work well, and this is just version one. Version 2 has only progressed as far as the picture with colored lines but already fixes some of the problems we saw while building version 1. Like adding the second virtual 4 bar to help with the torque on the wheel arms and having more bars to actually move the sides.
We still have a lot of testing to do on this before we think it can actually be our intake.
