Thoughts on the "pooper" design

What are your thoughts on the pooper design? (like what 99999v has) Personally, I think it could be useful for descoring during a match, but aside from that, if it were to be used in skills, the probability of the ball pooped out hitting another ball and messing it up is too high.

In response to the skills comment, as long as you tune it to kick balls out lightly with minimal force, even if it hits a ball it won’t be a problem.

There is great overall benefits of being able to get rid of unwanted balls with great efficiency, rather than kicking them out one of the ends. This is also beneficial if my robot is carrying an order of red, blue, red, I can get rid of the blue without losing one of my reds. I am quite fond of the design

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It’s a good design, probably the best for sorting balls. It does what it does well, which could be useful if your team makes cycling a very high priority. Skills runs are practiced so much that you could probably arrange the run so that you kick out a ball in a good direction.

The added complexity of design (it isn’t much, but it is something) to the benefits of cycling don’t make me feel that it is a worthwhile investment to build into your robot as a primary feature. I would probably just make sure there is space on the robot so that if you have extra time and find it is necessary, you could make one.

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if you have your skills route right, you can ensure that no pooped balls will come anywhere near any red ones. see 97963a’s skills route using a pooper, no red balls are at risk of getting hit.

it’s definitely a good thing to add on your bot, unless you plan on only doing remove events, in which case it’s kind of useless.

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I think it is very useful. We are blessed that we have already gone to three tournaments in Michigan, and I would say that it is much better to have a pooper than not having one. As for skills, we have figured out a way to keep it from rolling and hitting other balls. We also just started using the Optical sensor to auto-sort, and that has cut a few seconds of our skills runs.

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You can essentially poop out the ball when the pooper faces the wall so the balls don’t roll around. Other than that you can add some rubber bands in the way of the pooping exit which will slow the momentum of the ball as it gets pooped without decreasing speed. And like always what Xenon said, there are special skills routes designed for minimal pooped ball interference.

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I think it is essential for any good team to have for skills and in person events. As it allows faster descoring, as for remote events it is useless. But then again you can always just not use the pooping feature and your robot will work just as fine, if anything then better because you are eliminated a lot of the backspin that happens when a ball travels up against a roller and lexan plate, thus making it faster.

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I know you aren’t part of 97963A’s team but how do you get the motor to spin at a full 600 rpm with it geared up when spinning with a ball.

which motor, the launcher? if you want it to just spin at 600 rpm then just use 1:1 with a blue cartridge, no need to gear up. I would recommend somewhere around 1000 rpm though.

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Ya, the launcher. How do you get it to achieve 1000 rpm completely because when we looked at the rpm that the brain was giving us, the rpm dipped down from 600 rpm to 400-500 rpm(with it geared to 840 rpm). The brain is just measuring the rpm of the motor and it isn’t considering the gear up.

if you’re getting 400 rpm when you have it geared up to 840, you must have either a ton of friction or way too much compression. The rpm definitely will dip when you launch a ball, but I don’t think it should dip that much. Don’t worry so much about the rpm though, focus instead on how far the shots are. different levels of compression and hood designs can improve the launch speed just as much as the rpm.

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What do you mean by pooper?

its a set of rollers on the rear of the robot that can expel unwanted balls from the back

oh that’s interesting

Ok, thanks! I will do some more testing.

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