Flywheel ball shooter

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC > Turning Point (18/19)
1

Greetings everyone.

So it seems like the predominant design for launching balls at this point is either a flywheel or a slip gear.

Here is my question: for the people who have done flywheels in the past, how many motors did you allocate to the flywheel with the old system?

During the NBN season, we used slip gears to launch balls and they were simple. Knowing we would need another motor to adjust the pitch of the slip gear launcher, could it be as efficient in terms of motor allocation to have one motor to draw the slip gear back, and one to adjust pitch, or would a flywheel launcher still take less motors?

Thanks for the advice.

2

In NBN we used a three motor flywheel and got to worlds, this year we’re using 2 V5 motors

3

So I’d assume 3 motors for a single flywheel launcher in NBN?

4

@9409Robotics Yeah

5

You could probably get away with fewer, depending on your flag strategy

6

As of right now we have a pretty decent flywheel prototype with 3 393 motors

7

There were many teams in NBN with 2 motors or less on the flywheel. You can easily get away with two motors this season, for one major reason:

In NBN, the flywheel required more torque in order to more quickly compensate the loss of kinetic energy after firing a ball. That’s because the target was always the same.

In turning point, you have many targets, and each target must only be hit once. (At a time). So, in order to fire the second ball, you would either have to realign the robot because you missed the first ball, or because you’re going for the second target. So you would require a recover time of roughly .75-2 seconds, vs. a recover time of .25 seconds.

8

I have personally used 1 v5 motor on my flywheel and it has worked perfectly. I would recommend considering the use of one v5 motor instead of two. We are using our extra motor for a cap de-scorer.