It seems that many teams will be building a flywheel style ball launcher. I’m wondering if teams think that they will need to build their launchers so that they are adjustable regarding the angle at which they shoot, or if it would be fixed and just fined tuned enough that you know you can score from X location on the field with Y speed of the motors and from Z location with .75Y speed of the motors…etc.
My initial thought is that it does not need to be adjustable. Seems like a waste of a motor/pneumatics that have better use elsewhere.
Theoretically for a flywheel style ball launcher, you should be able to control your distance via adjusting the speed of the shooter’s flywheels. But that means the angle at which your ball will hit the goal will also be somewhat fixed: a given distance will have a given “re-entry” angle associated with it. If it turns out such an angle causes the balls to glance off the net, then you might have a problem. I know from watching kids play with the field at Worlds, that there are some angles that will cause the ball to glance off the net and bounce back onto the field, but since those balls had been thrown by hand, I don’t know if those situations would be relevant to an actual game situation. The “re-entry” speed will obviously matter. Of course, you could come up with a hybrid system that can alter the angle using pneumatics, so you might have a binary angle system - one angle for close shots, a different angle for long distance, etc. Only time and testing will tell, I guess.
my team did some math comparing,distance to goal with launch velocity, and using that equation, assuming one can determine the launch velocity at given motor speeds one could determine how fast to spin the motor for any distance.
the problem with not having an adjustable angle is that there is a fixed distance from which you CANNOT make the shot, this is a minimum distance not a maximum, for example, for a 60 degree launch angle, one cannot make a shot of less then 1.4 ft, assuming you launch form 3in off the ground. shorter than that, even if you launched the ball is a straight line you could not make the shot. just something to keep in mind