Day 18: Hopper Progress

Prototyping

Hopper / Feeder

Today we continued work on the hopper/feeder prototype. We went through a few more iterations revolving around the central design of a powered floor of rollers, but nothing seemed to stand out as notably better than what we started with. We tried putting Teflon tape on certain parts of the rollers to speed up feeding and we tried moving the ridge that creates two channels of balls higher up. We also experimented with passive back-feeder funneling methods, but realized that having a passive funnel in the back would be difficult to design with our high throughput goals in mind. None of these led to a significant improvement in the feeding rate. Going forward, we are most likely going to manufacture and use the powered floor with rollers, although it does leave some performance to be desired. Next build, we need to test the conveyor system and a center peak in the hopper itself.

Construction

Today, we made progress on assembling the bumper mounts and robot stand.