Hello, some of this is slightly off topic but I do have a reason behind it.
During the build season Team 1100 had a huge consistency issue with our basketballs. four out of our five were relatively normal (and behave how the competition balls behaved at WPI regional), but one was especially hard and dense. we had originality built an opposing wheel shooter that was powered by an FP motor on each wheel with a 4:1 reduction using KOP wheels. After testing we where not able to control the speed of the shooter reliably enough to score any balls consistently. We decided to switch to a single wheel shooter with both of the FP motors running on direct drive. The new shooter was capable of shooting 3 pointers from the key according to the math but wasn't meeting that in real life so we had a slight problem. To fix the problem we added two steel flywheels inside our shooter wheel (a 2.3" OD PVC pipe) each one is about a pound and has an OD of ~2 inches. and increased the compression of the ball by moving the back plate in, causing more energy to be put into the ball.
With these modifications we noticed a few changes:
- More consistency at all speeds, regardless of ball properties
- Better control of the ball, especially at low speeds
- Greater top-end range
- Less effect on our shooter' surface velocity while we were shooting
It should be noted that the only way we could increase the compression was to add the flywheel because the shooter bogged down to much without it.
At the WPI regional we decided to forgo shooting from the key because it was much more consistent to have our operator aim from the fender instead and we didn't fully have the control algorithm for our turret's tilt mechanism up and running. That said, 1100 was the first seed at the regional and only missed 5 balls all competition wile running in AUTO mode. Two of which were due to positioning the robot in the wrong spot to accommodate an alliance partner.
At Boston we intend to run the same auto-mode but shoot 3s from the key.
I hope this helps,
-Dan