Hi, my team can’t really get pneumatics or even if we did, this is our second year of vex so we aren’t the expert of how it can be incorporated into the robot. We were wondering if instead of pneumatics, something else can be used along with the flywheel to make the disk fly further?
What do you mean toake ot fly further? Because to make the disc fly fuether you can increase the speed of the flywheel or depending on the speed you can add a motor to the fly wheel system. Right now nany people are using 3000rpm on a 4inch flex wheel. That is a blue crate heared up 5:1. If this isnt what your looking for pls tell me and ill try to help.
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yes that is true, we are also using a flywheel 5:1 but in most youtube robot reveal videos, the robots have a flywheel and a pneumatic piston to support
That piston isn’t usually to make the disc fly further. Instead it’s actually an indexer, which just pushes the disk into the flywheel to be shot. The best alternative I can come up with would probably be using a cam, or a linear slide with a motor attached to it.
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Like @crumey said yhe piston is just to push the disc inot contact with the flywheel. You could easily make a motorized puncher,cam or conveyer that can dothe same thing. Our team uses a conveyer with a prong that pushes the disc
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pneumatics are definitely not essential this year, especially compared to last.
instead of using a pneumatic indexer (which is what feeds the discs into the flywheel in a controlled way), you can use a roller system. By placing rollers beneath the stack of discs, you can slide them one at a time into the flywheel. You can even do this without dedicating a whole motor, by ratcheting it to your intake so that when the intake spins forward, the indexer is still, but when the intake spins in reverse, the indexer spins forward. But if you have a motor to spare, it wouldn’t be terrible to just use it solely for indexing, and would get the job done for sure.
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You could also do a 2 motor flywheel and ratchet one motor off of the flywheel to power the indexer. Although you’d have to do some sort of a slipgear or cam system, depending on your setup.
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As someone else said the piston is just an idexer, its popular with vex because of motors limits. If you dont have access to one its still possible to make a motor indexer. If you really want a linear motion then you could make a linear slide but personally I think just having something turn out and push the disk is better and faster.
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