Just curious, since a few people have talked about lasers or sights, how many people actually use these and how effective are they?
All of the Kent Denver robots use lasers with built in distance measurers. It works very well for us.
My team, 6891, uses alignment tools. We place them in the corner and they align the robot with the goal.
At North Texas Regionals, I used a laser pointer, which made our alignment about perfect every time. Very useful.
We just use eyeball it. Our shooter seems to drift ever so slightly left for whatever reason, so until we either fix it or get the actual angle error measured, we just need to guess. We are starting to get that down, and our autonomous works much better when we get the alignment right. We tried using a laser pointer at one point, but we sucked at using it, and it didn’t help much.
We use a laser that has proved itself useful. We also use a trim bar so that we can adjust the laser horizontally to where the flywheels actually fire. If you have some sort of sight with an adjustment, It should be just as good though. We have a colored sight that we use when lining up for the long shot in the last 30 seconds. That way we have a better idea of how to line it up quickly.
We eyeball it, we tried a laser pointer, but it wasn’t powerful enough.
Iron sights. We havethe backplate bent up to make the angle,and it forms a hole we can look through and line up with other parts to aim into the goal
Do you use this function for anything? I’ve tried using one of these for other things, but found it far from accurate enough for anything that would be useful on the VEX field.
We use the same product as mwang17. Here is the product. The distance feature is not normally helpful or used, but can be if you think the field is wrong or to correctly set up a makeshift field. It will measure to the nearest 1/16inch accurately.
We use this laser sight: http://www.amazon.com/Vokul-Tactical-Laser-Pistol-Picatinny/dp/B00X356WZQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=sports-and-fitness&ie=UTF8&qid=1457226593&sr=1-1&keywords=laser+sight
It’s meant for pistols so it is very very bright. It’s clearly visible from 100s of feet so you have to be careful not to shine it at anyone. The sight will mount easily onto the new slide rails so I put a few slide trucks on one side of our robot. At the beginning of the match, we can slide the rail in (with the laser mounted) and precisely line up. Then we can easily slide it out before the match starts. With this setup it’s easy to take the laser off and put it back on and it sits in the same place every match.
There are four ways that I’ve used over the course of the year listed in order of increasing reliability.
1–Just looking from the robot.
2–Going behind the apex of the net an seeing if two specially placed bars are lined up.
3–Stretching a string from the robot to the goal and making sure that it passes through the exact center of the robot.
4–A specially built laser pointer holder in the center of our robot.
Laser works best for us.
We have a laser and at a competition we saw people using strings, and lasers.
You guys have some real cool lasers. I just use my old pen laser pointer and hold it against the flywheel on both sides to guarantee perfect alignment.
but ya, lasers are real fun (accurate too) 