Hello, I have now gone through my third iteration of my robot, and am now ready for a competition this week. With my robot complete, some thoughts on my robot would be nice. Any criticism and suggestions are appreciated, thanks!
Drivetrain
4 motor 1:1.6 speed, 4 omnis on pillow blocks chained together for 4wd
Lift
4 motor 7:1 six-bar
only 8 rubber bands aid the lifting of the arm
the arm stays up due to the programming that allows the motors to run at motor value 8 constantly to prevent sagging
Intake
Dual side rollers with big ball rollers
Catapult
2 piston forward catapult powered by one air tank
gets 4-5 FULL field shots
built in hook at the end for high hang
Hanging Lock
Able to lock at any height for low and high hang, and acts like a ratchet so that I can keep lifting my robot even after the lock is engaged. Can high hang with a big ball.
Autonomous
2 routines for match start, middle zone 15 points, hanging zone 6-7 points
Is there any particular benefit for mounting your intake motors horizontally (from the front perspective) as you have. It intrigued me when I saw it and could not think of any reason on my own.
Awesome robot! It looks amazing and seems to work quite well from the videos posted. I had a question regarding your big-ball holder… The single bar that holds your big ball for the launch, does it restrict you from just regular out-take of the big ball? The reason I ask is because we have a similar mechanism, except our holder is actually the backwards catapult itself… To out-take we have to lift the catapult for situations such as capping the stash goal or when we want to manipulate big balls when the air runs out.
The way the big ball holder works, is by moving the robot forwards and backwards while lifting the arm(in driver mode, in autonomous it was hard for me to do that). When i don’t do that, I can outake the larger ball and do anything like capping or hanging normally. Generally, if there is no more air for shooting, it just pushes the big ball back to my intake rollers. I can also move backwards and then forwards to make the big ball go back to my front rollers as well.
Very nice robot! Looking forward to seeing it in competition. Very creative use of the tires on the top part of the intake. I haven’t seen that before, but it makes me think “why didn’t I think of that?”
My team was very impressed with your pneumatic catapult. We have tried something similar but have never been able to toss at such a great velocity. All of our tests have been very disappointing. Do you have any advice on how to make a more successful catapult?
to make the most of the two pistons you must first mount the piston as close to 90 degrees as possible to the c channel or catapult bar. Next, you should start with mounting the pistons 4 holes away from the hinge of the catapult bar, and if it is not enough power, move the position of the pistons up one more hole so that it is 5 holes from the hinge, while still maintaining that 90 degree perpendicular angle. Repeat that step until you get the desired launch. Of course, it could be a lot more complicated than that. The explanation above is just something simple to work with.
Also note that the farther the large ball is back, the better launch you are going to get out of it.
