[IndySam]

We decided that we needed to be able to shoot from the key to eliminate any defense while in the process of shooting.

We quickly re-assembled our lunacy shooter which we were able to use for testing with little modifications. It became quickly apparent to us that because of the variability in ball density that we were not going to be able to achieve the accuracy we desired by using a wheeled shooter. We started doing different prototypes of ways to shoot the ball. My favorite was what we called pop-the -collar where we wound up a bolt of fabric on a pulley attached to a drill to shoot the ball, this idea was quickly discarded. We actually found that just using a flat stick was a very effective way to accurately throw the ball. We started prototyping ways of doing it when……..
I was doing seasonal work at AndyMark and I was having daily discussions about the problem with Mark. Team 3940 had come to the same conclusion as us by doing their own testing. Mark came up with the idea of putting the flat stick on a carriage and running it around a track like a roller coaster and the fling-a-pult was born.

3940 gave us the drawings for their plans and we set off to work. After seeing the initial testing of 3940’s shooter we made a couple modifications but these were mostly to aid in our manufacturing process and to try and lighten the shooter a bit. The mechanism worked so well that the tuning required was minimal. We actually made the first shots we tried with the assembled test robot.

What separated our robot from the other fling-a-pults was how we fed the balls into the shooter and where the shooter was located. We originally planned for a turret but scrapped the idea to save time and complexity, because of that we decided that we wanted the shooter to be in the center of the robot. This would allow us to turn the robot to aim the shooter while keeping the shooter and camera rotating on the same axis while turning. We also decided to load ours from behind the shooter instead of from the side to make feeding the balls easier without having to make the balls change direction while being moved inside the robot.

The only feature of the shooter that had much iteration were the actual shooter fingers themselves. We tried many types that mostly varied in how they cradled the ball and how long the fingers were to change the amount of spin imparted on the ball.

Our original robot design had three different positions for the shooter angle to give us different shot types. During testing we decided that this wasn’t necessary and settled on two positions, one for the key and one from shooting from the bridge. I don’t believe we ever used the long shot position in actual competition to make a shot but it was handy in helping with ball miss feeds.

I'll try and post a few picks and videos later.