Our goal is to "touch it, own it".  Our intake system needed to capture the note and then rotate allowing the intake to double as the feeding system.  In order to prevent the note from going all the way through the rollers we needed to create a barrier.

Last year we used cloth effectively to help funnel game pieces.  We decided cloth was ideal for this purpose - it was lightweight, could be easily prepared and we had lots of old bumper fabric saving us material costs.

To achieve the packaging and reduce the weight we determined that we could use one motor and then have an idler gear allowing us to change the direction of the bottom roller.  The Herringbone gear allowed us to 3d print gears that do not produce an additional axial load.

In order to determine the position of the note we explored a variety of options.  One sensor we looked at was the newly released LaserCAN.  There were a number of challenges with this approach.  The most concerning for us was wiring on a rotating arm.  In the end we settled on using the sensors built into the motor used to rotate the arm.  The amperage produced when a note is captured by the intake is very consistent allowing us to eliminate the need to have any wires attached to the intake at all.

The intake mechanism was designed with the mantra "touch it, own it".  In order to reduce degrees of freedom we explored the ability to use the intake as the feeding mechanism for the shooter.  During our tests we discovered that not only could the intake score in the shooter but it could do it very consistently.

The rollers are powered by a Kracken motor that is installed at the base of the intake.  The pulley is on a bearing allowing the belts to be powered while the motor stays low in the robot simplifying wiring and lowering the centre of gravity.

A 90 degree Max Planetary gearbox is used to rotate the intake into the various positions.  Dual chains are used to reduce the risk of a chain breaking and preventing the intake from working.  The sprockets were going to be delayed when we ordered them so we cut our own using our CNC equipment - they've worked very well!