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Unread 27-01-2012, 12:12
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Aur0r4 Aur0r4 is offline
Engineering Mentor
AKA: Jim Browne
None #1058 (PVC Pirates)
Team Role: Engineer
 
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Re: FRC 1058, the PVC Pirates Shooter

The tradeoff with a flywheel is that you have to invest more energy to start it (longer initial spinup) and to keep it going (marginally increased drag through the bearings). The benefit, like you said, Ty, is that you can fire off multiple balls faster.

The advantage of a lighter wheel with more motors is that you have the whole apparatus on for less time, and recovery can be just as fast because the moment of inertia is less. Of course, you're dragging around more weight and have to be a bit clever with allowing the motors to share the load consistently.

Our decision may depend on how the guidance system responds or what our game strategy is. If we take a while to lock on, we might want to be able to fire multiple balls quickly to take advantage of the target window. If our vision system and turret swing is quick, we may go with two motors and a quick spinup for a more drive-by approach.

We'll see! There's always multiple solutions...
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Jim Browne, EIT
Team 1058 - PVC Pirates