First idea was a simple intake made of bars with rollers on the ends that feeds in the balls and compresses them so that they move inside the frame perimeter towards the turret
Second idea was a system of cables like the Poly feeder --> scrapped because we thought it would have inconsistent performance and would break frequently
Feeder will probably extend around 10 inches from frame perimeter, but the exact length depends on how much we want to compress the ball.
Discussed with turret and climber teams about how to fit everything into the robot frame. Climber will most likely take up one side of the robot; the feeder and turret will take up the other side
Decided that balls are to be transported towards the turret through a tube on the side of the robot with an extendable portion to hold five balls.
Decided on a whole bumper rather than a split bumper: the balls are pushed up against the bumpers as they are compressed and fed up towards the robot
Started on a prototype mechanism to determine a good geometry for compression and intake of the balls
Billy showed us a design that brings the balls off to the side and behind the turret, which is facing the same way as the intake
Challenges
Need to better understand and finalize a design for our extendable portion of the ball holder: James had a good idea for one but it was hard to visualize, maybe work on a 2D schematic to better understand the geometry
We didn't really decide how many balls we are picking up at a time or how wide of a radius can the intake feed from
Potential challenge for later: Jonathan has a Mac desktop at home, and his laptop is not a personal computer so he cannot work on CAD at home
Work for Next Meeting
Talk to James and continue working on the geometry of the encoder and gate mechanism that feeds balls into the flywheel of the turret, maybe add to the 2D side view schematic that he already has up or make another one
Finalize whether we want to transfer the balls by gravity or by belts/cables
Need to find a good geometry and spacing of the bars that allows the ball to be compressed just enough that it can fit through the gaps between the bars and bumper and fed into the mechanism that brings it towards the turret
Need to figure out a good/reasonable amount of compression for the ball