With a lot of guidance from another coach, a couple of our middle school teams have been successful in installing and beginning to tune PID loops on the double flywheel shooters. There is one thing I have noticed that isn’t making sense to me.
It seems like the first ball always overshoots. We have not tested specifically for that yet, because I just noticed it at competition this weekend, but we will at our next practice. But it certainly seems to happen often enough.
In autonomous they start the PID loop, wait several seconds and then begin running the conveyor to feed balls to the launcher. If the target for the PID loop is good, with good being defined as other balls going into the net, shouldn’t the first launch be the best? The PID Loop has had several seconds to run and should as close to 0 error as it can get, shouldn’t it?.
So if the first ball misses that means the goal speed is incorrect. The fact that the other balls make it in seems to mean that the other shots were not back up to speed and thus kP should be larger.