[Ether]

AFAIK, we do not have official drawings or specs (of the sensor) from FIRST so I cannot say this definitively... but if the drawing that was posted earlier in this thread by colt527 is a reasonable representation of the hardware then the minibot moves the plate 1/4" and then closes the "switch" (which appears to be 2 metal pieces coming into contact) which acts as a hard-stop. High speeds of impact into this hard stop could arguably mean less contact time, not more.

The damping mechanism was suggested earlier in this thread by Squirrel (minibot) and jspatz1 (tower).

Everyone agrees that requiring multiple consecutive positive samples lowers the incidents of false positives.

The comment about interrupts was simply a clarification, for the benefit of students who may be reading, to an unqualified statement made about sampling. It may or may not be part of an eventual solution. Another clarification: an interrupt does not have to be "held". The ISR can spawn a high-sampling-rate temporary thread to run an algorithm to test for false negatives. Then it's just* a matter of adjusting the software.



* "just software". I hate that phrase. Don't you?