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Unread 12-05-2011, 22:13
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Randy Forgaard Randy Forgaard is offline
Parent 1729, former mentor 3126
FRC #7129
Team Role: Parent
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: Hollis, NH, USA
Posts: 48
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Re: Slowing down the action of a cylinder with flow control, mechanical or via softwa

Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesCH95 View Post
Regardless of its legality (IMHO I think it would be legal, and very cool) I think your ideal solution would be to use something like this electronic flow control unit. You could reduce the flow of air into the piston as it reaches the end of its travel.
I like the idea. However, I don't know if we could talk the GDC into allowing an electronic flow control valve next year. The pneumatic rules seem to be written so that on any robot, if you bleed the stored air at the manual pressure vent plug valve, there will be no stored air left in the system. If an electronic flow control valve were permitted, then in theory, it seems like the software could completely close the electronic flow control valve and leave stored air in the system. Manually-set flow-control fittings (and regular manual inline flow-control valves) presumably wouldn't have this problem, because even though they constrain air flow, they probably wouldn't be manually set to completely block air flow, because that would make them fairly useless on the robot.

It would be really cool if the GDC relaxed the pneumatic rules a bit, though. It would be nice to use tricks so that pneumatic control could be almost as flexible as motor control.