I’ve seen a lot of shooters prototypes for Spin Up as well as Ultimate Goal using curved shooters (like the MARC prototype). How do you all feel about this opposed to the simpler straight shooter? If you are going to used a curved shooter, how do you plan on creating the curve itself? I’m assuming the more consistent and prolonged contact between the flywheel and disk will help, but adding curved components in vex is sometimes tricky.
Curved shooters should be faster because the disc contacts the flywheel for longer, but straight shooters take up less space.
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This will make the disk fly farther than one launched from a straight flywheel.
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I think another thing is that a curved flywheel will also increase the spin on the disk, making it more stable. On another note, I am mainly doing a curved flywheel because you can intake and shoot from the same side, making it easier on the driver.
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Yeah if I do a curved flywheel my design is very similar just with metal on the top layer. Also MARC put some anti-slip material on the curve which sound interesting.
idk why they added anti-slip. seems like a bad idea considering anti-slip would slow down the dics
my guess is that the fiction made sure the disk shot out with force opposed to slipping out
We put the anti slip on our flywheel to increase the consistency of shots. The thought was that without it the discs have the potential to slide along the smooth side of the abs and how much each disc slips can be pretty inconsistent between discs, and this slippage could have an effect on the velocity and spin rate of the discs thus making the shooter less consistent / accurate.
Consistency is key on shooters, it doesn’t matter if your shooter can fire from all the way across the field if it’s so inaccurate that 75% of the shots from there miss. If you don’t have quite as much range but you know the shooter will hit what it’s aiming at 90% if the time, then you’re in a much better position.
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Because the disc is in contact with flywheel for longer you will get more speed at the cost of losing more flywheel speed and overheating faster
I will be using a single flywheel this year because a single flywheel gives the disk a spin as it leaves the robot, thus increasing accuracy.
If you use a double flywheel, the disk could drop suddenly or curve in its flight path
This is going to be my first year in v5 after 3 years in iq, and I used a flywheel design up I
until worlds for pitching in, where I transitioned to a catapult. Thus, I have my fare share of experience with flywheels. With a double flywheel, projectiles tend to be very inconsistent
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Hi, what type of material do you plan on using for this? Thanks
Which shouldn’t be too much of an issue if you only do close range shots. I’ve seen many teams get both designs to work, and I am excited to see which design sticks as the main meta this season.
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We used a 1/16" polycarbonate sheet from robosource
In a prefect world, you would have a launcher w/ dual wheels running at different speeds. This would impart some spin for stability but not so much as to make the disc ‘keep rolling’ when it lands.
Also, yes a curved shooter trades faster launches for a higher motor temp. But this is useless w/o hard data. We are seeing 20’ launches for 10 min straight w/o overheating.
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I like the idea of dual wheels a lot, but when I tried it a couple of months ago, I couldn’t find any speeds or offsets that would make it more effective than a good curved launcher.
It’s possible that someone will though. Maybe I missed something… who knows?