How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

We are currently going through ideas and trying to decide which would work best. Mostly we are imagineering and nothing is getting done.

I was hoping that we could find some inspiration from chief delphi. Any ideas and help would be appreciated.

Thanks so much and have a great season!

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

We have a conveyer from our ball-picker-upper to bring balls "up". From there they use gravity to get 'loaded'. We plan to push them into the "shooter" using either a motorized wheel (window motor, maybe a 4-6" wheel) or maybe a pneumatic cylinder. (We need to push "up" to put the ball into the shooter.)

Take some time to look at robot pictures from 2006 Aim High game.

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

That sounds very familiar, Don. I guess you took the words out of my mouth :yikes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB9IiNlYZm8

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

We're actually using a second arm that will bring the ball to the throwing arm at already calculated intersections between the circular paths of both.

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

I hope the giant up arrow makes it onto the final product.

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

So does Nick

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

we aren't really using a shooter, more of just a dunker, but we're using a combination of 2 polycord conveyor belts so that one functions as the feed (the bottom one) and the top will both store and quickly launch our 3 balls. Instead of putting one belt on either side of the ball, we will just have one motorized side which pushes the balls against the other, which will have a grippy surface to just roll them up the wall, which, we hope, will save on motors, power consumption, and weight.

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

We're using a swiveling "cannon." It will rotate to the ground to suck balls in, store them, then swivel up to shoot them at the hoops. A very unique design I've never seen implemented in my limited experience.

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

Here's a picture of our design:

Attachment 11542

There'll be a spinning wheel with surgical tubing grabbing the balls and shoving them up to a conveyor belt, with the top of the balls squeezed against something rigid. The balls will go up until the rigid part ends and a spinning wheel beings, which grabs the balls, forces them against a hood (that is movable to adjust the angle) and then out of the robot.

Oh, and the top will move somehow. (We are thinking the hood and wheel will be attached separately on a C that goes to the chassis with a lazy susan that is directly underneath the center of where the balls go from the conveyor to the hood, but that's still somewhat rough.)

Now I'm going to go uninstall the painting program I just downloaded

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

We're using a system of conveyor belts to both suck up the balls and pull them up to the shooter. They feed directly into the shooting mechanism. You should also take a look at some robots from lunacy and 2006. You'll probably find many different ways that would be effective here.

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

Magic.

-Nick

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

This sent a shiver down my spine. I think we should all be very afraid of what 1503 puts on the field this year. Then again when you look at their performance last year I guess that would be prudent anyway. ;)

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

Do you have a video of this? I had this idea during our brainstorming but we decided against it, I would love to see it.

Re: How are you feeding balls to your shooter?
 

My team's actually going for a rotating turret this year, so we have the added difficulty of feeding the balls through a rotating lazy-suzan. To do this, we have the conveyor belt to bring the balls to the top, then a second roller to provide enough "pinch" to stop the balls at the top, and roll them in when we want them. These balls then go directly to the thrower wheel. We still don't have a working example of this, I'll try to get a video up when we do. But if it fails, we have thought about putting in a pneumatic piston to stop the balls and only allow one through at a time. As we're trying to avoid pneumatics unless another need for them arises, we're gonna first try the roller design.