What do i do about ball “Squishyness” it is increasing by the day i have the balls and i am wondering if i should create my robot to work with a semi-squishy ball or a hard ball like they come brand new?
I would try to make the launcher work as well as possible with both because practicing you will be using squishier and used balls, however at worlds, the balls will be brand new and firmer than the ones you are used to. We don’t want it to be a situation like worlds toss up year with giant beach balls no one was used to.
What we did was we measured the diameter and density of each ball and then got a ball whose diameter and density was around the median. We then made sure that we had enough arc and distance making sure that ball hits the center of the high goal. So we still score the further goals when the distance is slightly shorter. We also score with the squishier balls when the distance is slightly longer.
Also having a single flywheel helps to reduce the effect of ball variations.
For more info check this out.
https://vamfun.wordpress.com/2015/05/28/vex-note-how-a-single-flywheel-ball-shooter-minimizes-the-effect-of-ball-mass-variations/
Hope this helps
David
We found that the orange balls were more squishy and would not launch as far with flywheels:(.
Make it work with both, I have no issues with that just because the robot was designed with that in mind
We have fought with the firmness of the nothing but net balls quite a bit. In the end it really comes down to designing your system to be able to handle them all. Honestly, it sounds like moving forward to shoot the hard and backwards to shoot the soft would work just fine if you are feeling them before loading your match loads. Just make sure you are communicating with your driver. We also noticed the issue with the orange balls, while driving I would just move closer to the net to shoot an orange, usually worked.
6430 Trinity Dragons
http://i.giflike.com/rlQhMPC.gif
If you look closely you can see the flywheels shaking, Im guessing this might have some relation to the fact you can shoot all types of balls?
the best way we have found to make our shooter work with all types of balls is to use 4 wheels
using 2 wheels (5 in) we found that the wheels were too close together for the firm balls, but what we have found is that if you take a traditional two wheel shooter and use an extra wheel on each shaft, you can then space the wheels apart to change the of the ball at the point it contacts the wheels, this allows you really fine control of the compression of the balls. Also, if ball “squishiness” does change over the season( and I think it will, a lot) then it is easy to change the spacing of the wheels to account for this.