Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
Please never have a student reach over the launcher to do that again.. That part of the video made me very very nervous.
|
Andrew,
Appreciate your concern for my arm. (I have kid arms?) The shooter was only loaded with about 5lbs of force (the minimum to make the choo-choo turn over properly) in that shot since we were aligning some sensors and I reached over the top so the camera could see what was happening, I assure you that's not a habit...
We were aware from the beginning of the design that we would need to have a safe procedure for releasing/resetting the system to get it on and off the field. Even while we are testing we don't want to rely on dry firing the system to release our shooter.
We tried several unpowered methods to release the shooter safely and ultimately given that our arm can be held cocked with ~40lbs of force and I don't want to be transporting the robot in a cocked state we will use a similar approach to release the shooter at the end of the match (minus the arm through the top obviously). We have a cheater bar that we stick in the end of the shooter to hold it down and then reaching under the shooter where the choochoo can be manually released and the shooter eased up. We are still working out if it's better to put a safety ratchet strap on the arm before we release, or if the process of putting that strap on puts more human bits in danger than it would be protecting. Of course we're also happy to hear suggestions for a better release method.