Hi Amy & Chris,
Thanks for your kind words towards are little catapult machine. I agree our machine could not compete with the sheer volume of balls that the best ball collector/dumpers could deliver. I guess we always knew that this could be a problem. Perhaps not the smartest move to play the game, but we really wanted to see if we could make something launch a ball into the air. We also thought that if we made a shooter with some sort of storage to launch on demand, we would have the option of running to any goal we wanted whether it was ours or not, place a couple of balls into it and try to max out the score rather than dump whatever we had all at one time. This strategy didn't quite work out the way we intended as we had a hard time tracking the number of balls in play and actually won a few matches for our oponents.
Thank you very much for graciously making that indexing cam for us. When we arrived in San Jose, our machine was basically untested and we spent the whole day wiring the machine missing all our practices. By the time we had everything working, we realized that we could not shoot balls as quick as we would like to because our indexing cam did not have enough dwell time to permit us to %%%% the catapult quickly. In LA, we put in the new cam and it definitely improved our reliability. Where it really made the difference, was at the Championships. Finally having some time to reprogram the machine, we were able to retune the machine so that it could fire a ball every 1.5 seconds (a big difference from San Jose). This definitely helped us earn enough QP to get in to the elimination rounds and we have your team to thank for a big part of it!
By tweaking the machine and completing the installation of some small items such as the cam, a switch to automate our grabbing mechanism, and new traction belts (Thanks Glenn and George from Team 60 for the advice!) our robot performed very differently and became much more competitive at the Championships than it was at any of the regionals.
I again just want to say thank you to Team 330 and Team 60 for all your help. We may not be regional champions, but we certainly had fun trying (Besides, we finally found a practical after competition use for our machine. It seems that our pneumatic goal grabber makes an awesome coconut cracker! I think we'll bring our machine down to Waikiki crack coconuts with our machine and sell them to the Tourist. If we make enough, maybe we can go to Orlando again
