To clarify our design, each shooter uses a 8" AM pneumatic wheel with 90" turns. We prototyped linear shooters using 8" AM wheels and we couldn't get our hands on the BaneBot wheels (see 67, 3847's shooters) in time for development, but the original goal was to have two linear shooters side by side, as you are proposing.
Our first strategy this year was to focus on autonomous. The original strategy of the double shooter was to allow "shotgun" blasts from closer ranges, such as touching the alliance wall (like Rebound Rumble robots touching the fender shooting lay-up) and the pyramid. Shooting two at once would speed up our fire rate - especially during the 15 second period, we believed - and we thought it was within our capabilities (spoiler: it ended up not being). What we really should have done was watch match videos from 2006, and realize that it would be best to optimize firing speed, not double the output.
The main problems this posed with the rest of our design were feeding the shooters with discs - taking them from the ground, and queuing them for the shooter. Integration. If we had devoted design resources to slick integration between our ground pickup and a single shooter, we would be able to shoot a lot quicker. Look at some of the most successful teams this year: 33, 469, 254, 118 - all of their subsystems for moving discs from the ground or feeder station to queuing for their shooters were robust and very efficient.
We also struggled with having each shooter shoot at the same height (we were still playing with it at our fifth event this year, the Championship)
Quote:
Originally Posted by BJC
Why did you decide on a double shooter? From a design perspective you would be much better off just making a single shooter that shoots twice as fast. Two shooters are twice as heavy and require twice the tuning and maintaince of one shooter. Even if you were just designing and building it for the experience you would still probably learn more attemping to optimize a single shooter.
, Bryan
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From our experience this build season, Bryan is fairly dead-on, and I give you the same recommendation he does. There has not been a demonstrated performance benefit (you can compare the performance of teams that had double shooters such as ourselves), and it essentially requires double the time/design resources for packaging the design, and mechanically tuning and maintaining each shooter individually. Weight was also an immense (pun intended) struggle for us this year, much more than other years.
I expect rebuilding your 2013 robot would be a lot more realistic and a lot more successful in competition with a single, efficient, quick shooter.