We (Team 356) built a ball shooter. I worked quite well. We could shoot properly inflated balls into a goal from about 10 - 12 feet away. We shot some over-inflated ones as much as 20 - 25 feet! We had about a 75% success rate at scoring balls during matches.
Unfortunately we just didn't get to use it very much. Positioning goals, defending goals, and blocking basket bots was almost always a higher priority than shooting balls. Things may have been different if our ball collector were a bit faster. As it turned out it took us several seconds to deliver a ball to the shooter once it entered the collection mechanism. At most we probably could have scored 6 - 8 balls if that were all we tried to do in our two minutes.
I think that if we'd had a faster ball collector, we could have given some of the best basket bots a real run for their money, delivering 15 - 20 balls per match. After all, they have to get to the goal to score where we can score from a distance. We hope to have this fix in place in time for Baxter's Ozark Mountain Brawl this summer.
Here's a picture....
http://theduchy.ualr.edu/first/2002/...m.pic.2002.jpg
-Joel