I know the main two designs this year are flywheels and double ball catapults but what are the advantages and disadvantages of each design
You should go to this thread for the best answers. Goes pretty in-depth into it; probably better off looking in there than creating a whole new thread about it. More people will probably post there than they will in this thread, but I could be wrong.
Just to try to summarize the points in the other thread:
Advantages of Flywheels:
-generally agreed to be most dominant design in NBN
-able to shoot from multiple distances
-if the first shot misses, the driver can adjust the robot before shooting the second shot
Advantages of double catapults:
-can shoot both balls at once with different angles
-(in my opinion) faster to feed
-does not require an indexer
At the end of the day, both designs can be quite good if tuned and driven well. Hope this helps!
I mean, you can make a good flywheel without an indexer, look at VCAT during NBN worlds, they used line followers to stop the intake automatically, which I can confirm works well this year as well.
VCAT also used two motors to run their intakes for NBN so they kinda had an indexer, I think @Anomaly was saying it is easier to make a one motor feeding mechanism to a double catapult than a flywheel.
You wouldn’t be wrong, but with some clever programming and sensors its really not that hard to do otherwise, but yeah that is extra effort, but what I’m saying is that it shouldn’t be your deciding factor. Another thing worth noting is that flywheels have a gyroscopic effect that can effect the turning of your robot, however little this is something to account for in autonomous and macros.