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September 21, 2006

 

Ball Elevator - Part 1


Haven't had too much building time the past few days, but I took a break from NXT learning to work on a ball elevator. I recently saw Philo's wonderful contraption, and from it, I stole the basis of the mechanism for lifting lego soccer balls.

I figured that with this idea, lifting the balls would be easy, but it was still a lot of work to get it working at all, and then to get it working consistently.

At right is a picture of the bottom of the elevator set to pick up the next soccer ball. Sorry the pictures aren't the greatest - I wanted to avoid using a flash and getting reflections and white spots. The chain is made of these, with a few of these interspersed. Note the blue liftarm. It keeps the balls from all rolling off when their is no "chair" ready to pick up a ball.

Now a ball has been lifted. The stopper liftarm is lifted by the chair as it goes by. Getting that stopper mechanism working took five or ten attempts. The hard part is stopping the balls with something that doesn't hit the chain, or stop the chair's movement.

Now, at left, the ball has been lifted a bit, and the stopper liftarm will fall back into place just in time before the balls roll off onto the baseplate.

Finally, here is a picture of a ball at the top of the elevator, just about ready to go over the top, and onto ... something that I haven't built yet! I think what I'm trying to build is called a Gravitron, but I can't find a good picture of one (not the amusement park ride - the thing they have in science museums).

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