Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominick Ferone
The argument was started while going over the design of our hockey puck shooter on whether we should go:
air powered(paintball gun like)
inline wheel shooter(ultimate ascent)
top wheel shooter with roller bottom(baseball shooter)
Spring loaded plate(pinball)
Slingshot
or is there something else more efficient to shoot the put accurately at really high speeds for our challenge.
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For hockey pucks, I would constrain the puck to be flat with some sort of chute and use a dual-wheel (left/right) shooter. If you want them to fly rather than slide along the ground, you could make one of the wheels rotate a bit faster than the other to give some gyroscopic stabilization.
Also, I recall a linear accelerator that I rough-designed for Aerial Assist that used a motor and gearbox, two linkage arms, and an angled glide with a basket that the ball sat in. The point of the two-armed linkage was to match impedance between a motor/gearbox running at a constant speed and a load which was accelerating. If you aren't interested in picking up strange pieces (or will do this separately), this would be a useful design. We didn't build it (used a hammer for AA), but I am pretty sure we could have gotten the yoga ball high enough and far enough to make clear truss and high goal within the required frame perimeter. By making the travel longer and gearing the motor lower, any reasonable speed should be feasible. I'll look for the drawings and spreadsheet this evening.