Fully Motor Powered OTB Intake with Floor Roller

This past CADathon, team pp wanted to have a bottom roller in order to ensure that no footballs would get sucked under the robot. However, we soon came to realize how terribly this type of intake packages, and I was forced to severely cut the height of our indexer to avoid this interference.

Previously, all my intakes have been made out of 1/4" polycarb and deployed via pneumatics. I wanted to get design experience with a different style of intake, so I chose to use a falcon to deploy my 1/4" pocketed aluminum intake plates.

All of these design choices lead me to create this intake.

Any critiques regarding the render or design would be greatly appreciated.
edit: just noticed that the 2 of the standoffs are forming a cage around the leading roller. I will be removing those standoffs.


How much does it all weigh in the end?

Are you saying the falcon powers the entire intake but also turning it on lets it drop down?

The weight in CAD overall comes out to be 12lbs. I think it would be reasonable to assume that the final weight would be around 15lbs.

The falcon on the left powers the rollers, the falcon on the right controls the deployment.

Do you need the intake to be able to retract? If you can avoid this, then there are a lot of neat passive ways to deploy an intake you may wish to also consider.

Also, am I missing something, or is the bottom roller spinning the same direction as the top roller? That won’t work.

In general I had intake be able to retract in order to minimize the amount of time that it can be hit. I don’t know if it’s really necessary, but it’s just something that I’ve usually done. Would you have any recommendations to look at?

Regarding the bottom roller, I totally forgot that I have to flip the direction of the spinning. I’ll probably put an infinity polycord run so that I get the appropriate direction of spinning.

What is the gear reduction on the deployment falcon? It seems a little fast from just the CAD gut feel. Although I could easily be wrong, hard to see in the renders.

Why polycord? Everyone knows infinity timing belts add an extra 5 horsepower, polycord doesn’t add any extra :stuck_out_tongue:

We actually used a few infinity timing belts on our robot thisbyear when the polycord ones were slipping. Definitely didn’t expect them to work but they worked great for a whole competition.

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i’ve never tried the timing belts but shouldn’t they rub together?

They do but we used them for indexing so the wear wasn’t noticeable.

The main thing is the runs are short enough the teeth cross each other at a decent angle, there is a lot less friction than you may think.

Is it possible, relevant, etc to use a servo to deploy/retract an intake?
I assume that a main problem would be that a servo doesn’t have enough power to lift the intake, but what else?

That’s about the only problem with it. generally they aren’t fast, but with a powerful enough servo you could do it.

Reduction on the deployment falcon was supposed to be 50.63:1. However, on the cad it ended up being 4:1. Initially, I had a gear stage to further increased the reduction but I just forgot that it existed during the CAD. Should’ve drank more coffee.

Have you ever had to debate whether to add in pneumatics for intake deployment? Low on pdp slots because you decided to innovate with 6 wheel swerve? Worry no more. With the OzzyBoards Super Servo (designed to be powered by the REV Robotics Servo Power Module(SPM)) there’s another COTS option to bail your team out. By combining a high power motor with a robust gearbox the Super Servo allows teams to build and control mechanisms with minimal programming and cost. Not convinced? Here’s some documentation http://ozzyboards.com/super-servo/! Or since this is FRC and reading documentation is objectively a waste of time, here’s a super servo in a clamp that’s clamped to a table spinning a battery that’s duct taped onto a piece of versaframe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBCaE7FjXY0&feature=youtu.be


the only torque measurements I accept are in elephant-football fields


Anything but the metric system.

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