Launching Mechanisms w/o pneumatics

I have seen and heard of a few good designs for a launching mechanism in this game. However, a good 95% of them require pneumatics, which our school has yet to purchase. What would be the best launching mechanism with just high speed motors?

I could see using motors to spin wheels like a football shooter does, you could also use it to pull back on rubber bands and shoot.

I do not think teams will be able to use pneumatics because I don’t think you could get 25 cycles with enough strength by only using 2 tanks.

Just as a shout out to VEXs robot in 3 days I will bring up that the cho cho mechanism that team JVN had was very clever for storing and releasing energy on a catapult.

I’m considering using a cam and follower with some rubber bands to help the follower have more power when it springs forward. You could have that running on high speed so you could fire rapidly without pneumatics. The follower would be attached to some sort of a plate that hits the balls out in a launcher.

Please don’t buy out all of that kit, haha. We still need to get one.

Well, you could use pneumatics to quickly change the angle of the shooter to get a close range and long range shot. Side rollers might work, but I’m thinking air resistance will have a big effect on them.

There are ways of feeding a shooting wheel without the use of Pneumatics, such as in the 2012 FRC Game, our FRC Robot was able to feed our shooter wheel without any Pneumatics, it used pulleys and cord to push the balls up, and then one by one fed to the shooter.

Heres a video:

3 questions. What is the climbing zone? Can we expand any in the “nothing but net” competition? Is there a limit to the number of balls we can carry after autonomous?

The climbing zone consists of the 4 tiles within the white tape square. You can expand when fully within the climbing zone, but you can only expand vertically during the last 30 seconds. Finally, you can only possess at most 4 balls at any given time.

The “climbing zone” is the area made by the white lines near the starting tiles. I am unsure if it the triangle made by the lines or the cube made by the white lines and the field corner. You can only expand in this zone, but may only expand vertically in the last 30 seconds of the game in this zone. You are only allowed to carry 4 balls at any given time.

Perhaps start by reading the game rules?

I didn’t read the game rules but I misunderstood them. Thanks for the ones who explained it to me!

I did read the game rules but misunderstood

I actuall do not think many teams will even use pnewmatics to shoot thr balls due to the fact that everytime you fire the output power will be differend giving you a different distance shot every time and you are only allowed two air tanks this year.

I have heard teams where we are using pneumatics to disengage gears to launch slingshots and and catapults and not launching specifically with pneumatics.

Yeah i have heard that aswell but i think to be a “good” robot you are gping to have to launch 60-70 balls in a match and even if you only useing pnewmatics to disengauge a gear i dont think 2 air tanks will be enough.

Using high speed motors and running chains from big to small gears using rubber tank treads or rubber wheels (spinning them at high speed) will shoot a ball very well. My class is working on the different ways to shoot the new balls and the treads and rubber wheel seem to work efficiently

You could use a servo to disengage a gear instead, eliminating pneumatics entirely.

This has the far greater cost of wasting a motor.

You have a mighty fine bar for the “good teams” I would love to see what the “best” teams do :eek::eek:

I’d say do that and high elevate.