Could anyone help me out with the best ratio for a flywheel doing bar shots? We’re planning on a heavy flywheel for less recovery speed. Thanks in advance!
I think that for a shorter range flywheel, you might want a lighter flywheel so it takes a shorter amount of time to spin up to speed. I use a 24:1 gear ratio (15:1 with high speed motors) with 3 motors that can shoot just about full court at full power.
I have found that a 7:1 gear ratio with 4 motors works best for a feild launcher.
To clarify, this flywheel is strictly bar shots only, not anywhere else
For our team we had a flywheel problem mainly regarding the accuracy. Our’s was a double flywheel with two traction wheels on both sides connected to a 36:1 gear ratio. The only problem was that PID control could not keep up with the flywheel and we were not accurrate all the time.
Many of you are saying a lighter flywheel is better, but won’t a heavier one have a lot less recovery time? It would take time to speed up, but the momentum would keep it going at constant speeds between balls.
Yes, a somewhat heavier flywheel will have a lower recovery rate, but the time saved by this is negligible on a short range flywheel, especially since a short range flywheel turns on and off a lot in matches.
We use a 2 turbo motor single flywheel with a 7:1 external gear ratio for our bar shots. Though, we only use one 4" wheel on the launcher and will be using our programming to keep a fast fire rate instead of including more mass.
A heavy flywheel slows down less. However, it also takes longer to recover from that slowdown. Eventually, the amount of deceleration caused by launching balls becomes no longer tolerable, and you need to wait to start shooting again. A heavy flywheel may work well with field robots, which only carry 4 balls at a time, and must stop shooting anyway to collect more balls. However, there is no way that you can practically get enough inertia on the wheel to launch 24-32 balls 17 feet without slowing down enough to make a difference. Also, you would be unable to have an effective autonomous routine, since those 15 seconds would involve accelerating the flywheel. If you wanted, you could make a pneumatic ripcord with a ratchet, but then you just took off 2 motors if you aren’t already using pneumatics, and I’m not sure what the return would be as far as spin up time.
We shoot full court, with a single flywheel using 5" wheels and a 28:1 gear ratio (35:3 with turbo motors). On our first iteration, we used 3 wheels stacked, and we had about an 11 second spin up time, and about 1 ball per second. On the second iteration, we took off one wheel, so now we only use 2, and we have gotten our rate of fire up to about 2 balls per second, with about a 5 second spin up time (we need to do more testing, and tune our controller).
We use a linear puncher w/ magazine for autonomous and I’ll field preloads. We are building this flywheel STRICTLY for bar shots.
VEX Nothing But Net Highest Scoring Match Southern Ontario 1104G & 1104Z
If you search that in YouTube, we are aiming to have a similar flywheel to the field robot on the winning team
Try 1:7 with turbo (about 1:16 total) on a 5inch wheel. With simple speed recovery it shoots 4-5 balls in about 1.5 seconds.
Would the 1:16 be able to shoot from slightly further in case someone blocks the bar?
Yes, it’ll shoot several feet at 127 power, and you wouldn’t even need that to shoot at the bar, or even a tile (2 feet or so) away from the bar.
Not to hijack this thread, but my team is not allowed to use turbo motors, so would a normal motor geared 1:15 work as well?
The ratios are nearly the same, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, especially since a 1:16 is enough to make half court shots.
Thank you, 2 more questions… Heavy or light flywheel for strictly field. And 48:12,48:12. Or 60:12, 36:12 for the gear ratio.
I’m not too sure where he got 48t from, that’s why I selected the 2nd ratio.
You can get 48 and 12 tooth sprockets.