Feel free to ask any questions! Sad that it didn’t work perfectly but thats why the US Open exists ;))
13 Likes
I noticed you match loads were triple stacked. Is that legal? I did a quick preview of the rules and it actually doesn’t say anything about this! Wow I’m surprised not many teams have used this before that I’ve seen.
3 Likes
The game manual tells you only things you must do, and things you can’t do. There’s no way it could tell you all the things you might do…and it never discusses any game strategy, that’s up to clever thinkers!
6 Likes
How were you able to get the catapult to fire from so far and from so short? I have a cata team at my school and they only have one set firing angle and power.
For anyone wondering, we use a 2 motor power sharing system with ratchets between our catapult and our intake. This allows us to have a 6 motor 480 rpm drive. We use metal slip gears for the catapult, and a piston boosting system that can achieve 3 seperate shot powers.
2 Likes
How is your piston boosting system setup and how do you switch between the three power levels
1 Like
They are just changing the distance the catapult rotates back
We use a total of 4 solenoids to power our boosting system. This is how we do our power levels:
- Regular shot power- There is no air going into the cylinders, since they are dual-acting, it doesn’t impact the shot at all.
- “Mid-Boost” shot power- We power both sides of the cylinder at the same time, one side with the full psi from the tank, and on the other side we use a pressure regulator to put about 50 psi into it. The piston still “boosts” the catapult, but not too much. We use this shot power to make it from slightly farther away.
- “Boost” shot power- We power only the bottom port of the cylinder, to boost the catapult with 24lbs of force.
Another thing to note, we mount the pistons at a slightly different angle such that they push only push on the catapult when it is past the center point of the axis the pistons are mounted on. This means that the catapult does not actually have to apply much force to overcome the power of the piston at the bottom, but as the catapult gets closer to the top when it releases, the angle aligns correctly for the piston to apply force to the shot.
Nope. Drawback distance is the same, and that is one of the hardest things to vary on a catapult if you were to use a slip gear like we do. We actually use two slip gears in parallel, one for each arm.
9 Likes
That’s pretty neat, sounds like a one-way solenoid per cylinder port
Yes. We use 4 single action solenoids, one for each port.
2 Likes
That is incredibly smart, great idea!
This was answered at my (nevada) state competition. As it turns out, you can actually put all your preloads onto the field at the same time, as long as you let them go and don’t push them. doing more than 3 onto a passing robot could be useful too, as sabotage by putting 4 rings into a robot as it’s passing also wouldn’t be against the rules.
1 Like
Thanks for posting this Q&A reference. I just refereed our state tournament and this was fresh in my mind. Just about everyone else there thought you had to introduce them one at a time (including other refs and REC reps). Referencing Q&A 1216, with its included images, made it an easy discussion.
Note: Most teams still introduced them one at a time, even if they were just dumping them in to plow into the low goal.