So my I was thinking of building a ball puncher for the ball shooting system for the new 2018-2019 competition, Turning Point. The only problem with this is that I cannot think of a way to load the balls from the ground, since we have to be able to change the position of the puncher to aim. If anybody could help give me any ideas/examples that would really be great. Thanks in advance.
You could swing the puncher to a too-high spot where it flips something to receive a ball. You could rotate the back end of the launcher up and down instead of the front so the balls enter basically the same spot every time. You could use something flexible (tubing, cord, etc.) so that you can roll balls down varying angles into the moving launcher. That’s just a few ideas off the top of my head; there are bound to be plenty more.
Use a conveyor that goes above the puncher, they then fall down into the puncher. If you still wonder look at nbn
Flywheel to load a Flywheel…
Seriously Guys, vex is not too hard … Most of these games include game mechanics that were already nearly perfected, if not perfected by some random super good team in a random situation. Simple guys, take game mechanics that have already been used and battle tested and start with those, if its not perfect for the new game, start tweaking it … so yeah stare at some NBN bots and how they feed and see them go to town. The hard part of the flywheel will be consistency… to that I say good luck. All I say is I’d start with a way over powered flywheel and basically shoot balls such that the angle the ball travels from the flywheel to the highest flag is basically a strait line. That’s the most accurate flywheel i can think of, albeit inefficient, good programming will allow you for greater motor efficiency but a little less accuracy. With v5 id be tempted to go 2 motors for caps and 6 motor drive for the first comp and then work on building a flywheel module you can attach to the current first bot. I’m not sure how I got this far off topic but hey so is life.
Usually I’d agree with the theory that the game mechanics have already been perfected, but I really don’t think it’s necessarily the same game mechanics for the ball launcher. NBN bots were made to be able to consistently pick balls up from the ground and throw them to the high goal, whereas this year we have to pick them up from varying heights and locations and throw them at two separate targets.
I think punchers would be much more effective with the plastic balls this year than they were with the foam balls in NBN due to the stronger elastic collision. Also, the vast majority of a bot usually has to be dedicated to a flywheel, but punchers are much more compact, leaving the rest of the space for the cap manipulation part of the bot. I think the meta is going to be two subsystems, one for scoring caps, and another for balls. Realistically, teams are probably going to combine the two, but that’s just early season thoughts.
I went and looked at the Nothing But Net World champions robot. So I am thinking about a smaller scale flywheel with a conveyor modeled after the Nothing But Net World Champion robots.