James Smith

One of our off-season advanced projects is creating a cascade elevator. We previously made a continuous elevator for the 2023 Charged Up season, and we hope to expand our knowledge on creating robust elevators for the future. An elevator has been an important system used to achieve game tasks by many top teams in the past. An elevator is often used to manipulate game pieces to a raised position or to climb during the end game. Having an elevator allows for more scoring opportunities to gain an advantage during competition. Compared to a continuous elevator, a cascade elevator is faster due to the simultaneous movement of stages and has a consistent carriage motion, while being simpler to rig.  Going into the project, we set a goal to create an angle-adjustable 2-stage cascade elevator that can extend 4 feet in ~1 second and be able to lift the robot 2 feet off the ground. To learn about creating an elevator for the build season, we aimed to make the elevator fully functional on one of our swerve drivetrains to understand the process from start to finish. Due to our goal of creating an adjustable elevator, used a 7/8in diameter dead-axle tube mounted on an adjustable plate on the swerve drive base. The angle can then be fine-tuned with the carbon fiber [...]