[Madison]

So, here's the story...

After observing the local scrimmage a bit on Saturday and understanding more about how chaotic the game might be, seeing how poorly and inaccurately a great number of machines shot the Poof balls and testing our own shooting mechanism and taking inventory of the challenges we needed to overcome to make it reliable and effective, we made a strategic decision to abandon shooting and focus instead on scoring 1 pt. goals as effectively as possible. We'd planned all along to be able to score in the lower goals, but the shooting mechanism had taken valuable resources that were better used elsewhere.

By removing the shooter, we gained about 15 lbs. to play with and used it to redesign our hopper and beef up our conveyor. The whole hopper slides up and down on a piston to move it into position to score in the lower goals while avoiding nearly any chance of violating R04. Within the hopper, two pistons in line actuate independently, giving us a closed position for match start, an opened position that'll store approximately 60 balls, and a dump position that lowers the hopper to the proper height to gravity feed those balls into the goal. The right picture was taken without the hopper's walls for clarity.

We added fabric to the conveyor to minimize sideways stretch as balls make their way and to help alleviate some problems with the urethane belting walking off its pulley. We stitched the belting to the fabric, so if the belts come off, it still works perfectly.

We're proud. It was a tough decision, particularly because of the work that many put into prototyping the shooting mechanism and writing some amazing camera code that functioned far better than its mechanical counterpart, but we believe that we decided early enough to make the change and focus on our strengths. This robot will be far more effective and competitive as a low-goal scoring machine than it would have ever been if we spent all of time fiddling with a shooting mechanism that was no more remarkable than anything else on other teams' machines.