I was wondering what teams are using there pneumatics for this year. I was also wondering where on a robot pneumatics function the best and the worst.
Well my team used it for a quick release, but now we’re thinking of using it for a brake.
Transmissions… vrooom vrooom 
Disclaimer: these are just my opinions
Good:
table dumper
high goal flipper
spatula-dumper (if you’re into that)
Bad:
gear shift (often unreliable)
lift (weak)
The best thing you can do to find the best place to use pneumatics is to find out where only two states of position are used (up/down, left/right, forward/backward, etc.) Point is, there are only two positions that will ever be used.
Once you figure that out, find out what’s most important to you on your robot.
To answer your question a more practical way:
[LIST]
*]Flipper (spatula type deal)
*]Lift (can only go two states, somebody posted some pictures somewhere)
*]Brakes (as already discussed)
*]Tilting anything
[/LIST]
just an idea … connect it to a plate … and have it fitted to the back of the robot, in case u flip … might b able to flip you back (if robot is light enough) … just an idea (i dont work with pneumatics)
No offense, but there are much better ways of preventing a robot from flipping in the first place, which don’t require the addition of pneumatics. As far as the original question goes, I don’t really wanna give away any secrets. So far the others have covered most of the more practical ones. Something important to note is that unless the pneumatics are crucial to the design or provide an excellent advantage, its probably better to get rid of the extra weight.
My team is [trying to] use pneumatics as a sort of arm-locking system. Using ratchet gears, the pneumatics raise/lower the little foot so that the motors can lift the arm, pneumatics fire, and then the motors do not have to provide power to keep the arm raised. Of course to lower the arm, the arm has to raise a tiny bit to unlock the foot, but that isn’t an issue.
We use them for transmissions and tilts on our intakes as well as a suspension on a drive oh yea and spliting a robot apart:)
We locked our lift earlier this year and all we used was a L-channel on a hinge attached to a piston. The piston would fire pushing the L-channel from parallel with the ground to perpendicular with the ground with a little help from elastics to get the full ninety degree angle change. This acted like an arch for our lift arm to rest on then when we wanted to move the lift again we would raise it and pull down the pneumatics.
We had a design change and now we only use pneumatics to push our top sucker down.
Vex has ratchet gears? I did not see them on their website…
They are in the winch kit.
Ohh what a waste… They should sell more stuff individually like I needed 12 tooth sprockets and only 2 come in a $30 kit… so 15 per sprocket and a bunch of other useless stuff…
Same with high strength gears