Team 4733 Lego prototype
 

This is my first post in CD. Our team has been trying to decide between a wheeled or catapult shooter. The video by TechHOUNDS with their wheeled shooter prototype was encouraging. Here's their video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcHGD...&app =desktop

One of our members made a Lego model of a wheeled shooter robot and put up a video describing what it did. I was wondering what your thoughts were on this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISry5_w9qUw

Re: Team 4733 Lego prototype
 

Very nice looking prototype! Using LEGOs and other things that can be quickly assembled are a great way to get an idea of where things will end up on the robot. Our team had some reservations about a wheeled shooter because we were worried about damaging the covers but as you've seen, they can work and have a few advantages like shot variability and spin control. I would definitely mock something up at full scale using wood or something like that so that you can be sure that you can make the shooter work to your specifications within your size constraints - I will be especially interested to see how that loading mechanism works out. Good luck this year and welcome to chief delphi!

The shooter idea didn't fly with the team. We're deciding on a catapult but it's really vague. The wheeled pick up mechanism is still good though. We're behind schedule D:

I liked the wheeled shooter! It was different than catapult after catapult. Our team is also doing a catapult, (yawn)

Nobody wants to take the risk. Our team's main concern for most people was we couldn't change the angles to throw over truss as well as shoot. But not being able to throw and still shoot is better than not being able to do anything because all your systems went wrong since they were so complicated. I'm trying to convince them we don't need to be able to throw and shoot. Even our sponsors wanted something that was a copy of RI3D. Sigh*

I have to say that a wheel type shooter worked really well for my team. We were stuck like many other teams out there on how to shoot the ball. Some of our team members concluded that the wheels could rip the fabric off the ball so we decided to prototype this design to see if this was true. It ended up not being true at all. We shot the ball from our wheel shooter a whole bunch of times (didn't count) and nothing on the ball was damaged. The wheels also gave the ball a great distance as well before it hit the ceiling. But the wheel shooter did work with no complications.