What is the best angle for the ball launcher?
What type of launcher specifically?
Also what game strategy are you going for? Field bot, full field etc
45 degrees should be fine
You could go lower depending on how much room you have for mounting and your personal preference. I’ve seen many teams with dual flywheels that shoot line drives at the net with their loads.
its a full field, and a double horizontal flywheel
Don’t do this for the love of robots and nets don’t. Too many teams in my area do this because one team did and it’s an awful idea. It is very hard to be accurate and is susceptible to the very slightest change in RPM. at least angle at 45 or 50 so you don’t have to run at 127 power. At 50 degrees on my single flywheel I operate at 66-70 out of 127. Plus if you have a flat angle you cannot in field without moving back and slowing way down.
45° is realy close to what my team uses. Actually, we use 45° gussets on the hood, but we twist them as far back as the screws allow, so it ends up being about 50°. If you are a field-only bot, you might want to increase the angle a bit more, since we need to be about 4 feet behind the bar to make it in the high goal. Also, that is a single flywheel (hence the hood), with a bendy polycarbonate hood that springs back a little bit when we shoot.
we are currently using 25-30 degrees and this produces what we call a bullet bot where you fire so fast that the ball travels more in a line than a parabola. These can shoot from full field and mid field, but i would give up on short range efforts with this. Despite what has been written if you have a good velocity control mechanism you will be fine. One problem you are going to find whatever angle you choose is how much you compress the ball, this can really affect your shot.
This sounds seriously like you are overpowering the shot and putting significantly more energy than necessary for little more than convenience.
The higher power and lower angle is more accurate when compensating for the different consistencies of balls. When you have a higher angle using less power the balls tend to undershoot or overshoot depending on the consistency.
My team has found that with less of an angle their launcher is more accurate. BUT, they also do not have to turn their launcher into a particle accelerator either. Moderate velocities that don’t destroy the net work.
In the end it’s about finding a good combination of compression, angle and launcher speed
That’s seems like a strange approach to the problem. “it is hard to shoot efficiently” your solution seems to say “Then don’t shoot efficiently”. What type of launcher do you have? The most accurate flywheel robots I have seen all had high angle shooters. Remember you want to enter the goal perpendicular to the plane of the opening so the most variation will still go in the goal. A lot of the “bullet bots” that I have seen will skim the bottom of the net or brush off the top.
The most accurate flywheel launcher i have seen shot the balls in a straight line towards the net. I do not have a “problem” with consistencies because i have a linear puncher. If you have a flywheel that launches every ball in a straight line, that is more accurate than chancing the launcher with a higher arc.
Case in point. They had more success with the lower angle.
This is purely anecdotal, but my impression from tournaments here is that the “bullet bots” are higher scoring from the loading zone than those with more of an arc. But, they can’t seem to score from anywhere else
We have our single flywheel at about 15 degrees, since it is specialized for scoring from close ranges.
Almost every bullet bot in my area has some sort of issue with accuracy. Either lack of speed control, or speed difference in the two wheels coupled with bad compression. Almost all of the single flywheels in my area are 45 degrees or higher, and have had almost 100% accuracy with little speed control. The ones with speed control just shoot faster. Plus with backspin, the area I can hit with the ball to go into the net is greater than a 30 degree robot could ever achieve. Double flywheels also have some inherent knuckleball to them, so they also can hit on the edge of the net and bounce out despite being perfectly lined up.
is this 15 degrees from the horizontal or vertical?
Chancing with a higher arc? You are statistically more likely to make your shot with a higher arc. Why do you think basketball players shoot with a high arc? While the NBN net’s opening is not completely horizontal like a basketball hoop, it is more horizontal than it is vertical. The most “accurate angle” is the one that matches the angle of the opening in the net.
In general, “bullet bots” or “line-drivers” tend to break the nets. To be blunt, that’s just stupid and careless.