Hello all,
I haven’t seen any real discussion yet on ways to toggle the flags quickly and efficiently, so I’ve started one. Please try to keep it civil and constructive.
My current idea is a turret mounted single wheel flywheel. A lot of teams came up with great turret systems during NBN but I think using tread will be the most accurate. The turret could be zeroed to always be pointing at the flags via a gyroscope and accelerometer mounted to the chassis and an encoder on the rotation mechanism. The target acquisition and minute adjustments could be made using the v5 visual sensor.
The VEX accelerometer is extremely difficult to use. Lots of noise; requires double-integration to get position on the field (device returns acceleration – integrate once, you get velocity, integrate again, and you get distance). You can imagine the amount of error/ick-ick you’ll encounter in this process when the original device already contains a lot of noise. So, gyro yes, accelerometer, not so much.
If you tune the flywheel just right, you may be able to toggle both flags effectively from a set firing position by exploiting the fact that when something passes through a flywheel, some of the energy leaves the flywheel, leaving it at a slightly slower RPM than it had to begin with. You could conceivably have a loading mechanism that drops both of the balls into the flywheel in quick succession so the first one launches at full speed hitting the top flag, and the second ball launches with a slightly lowered velocity so that it hits the middle flag before the motors have time to compensate for the energy lost.
You could do the same thing, but with significantly more consistency if you just set the Velocity control your using for the flywheel to a lower setting after firing the first shot. This would prevent you from overshooting, and if it ended up being at the right speed anyways (as your proposing) then it’d fire straight away anyways.