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Unread 02-10-2006, 00:24
Andrew Schuetze's Avatar
Andrew Schuetze Andrew Schuetze is offline
499 Founder / Alamo FTC & FLL AP
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Team Role: Leadership
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Rookie Year: 2001
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Posts: 689
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Re: Optimizing Air Cannon Range

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
I'm still skeptical of unmodified sprinkler valves. That's a heck of a restriction in your system if you can avoid it. Energy spent making your robot honk is energy that's not getting transferred to your shirt. I will admit, however, that you might not have a better option before 10/20. As you'd guessed, a large chamber connected directly to your valve would be much much more efficient.
Thinking along the same lines, I traded in a Rainbird valve this evening for a 1 inch ball valve with a three inch lever handle, rotates 90 degrees.

The plan is to test this manually as a comparison to the sprinkler valve and if it yields a better performance, the we will have to build in a festo solenoid activated pneumatic piston to open and close this valve remotely.

We have a bit more time to prototype as we are shooting for, pun intended, the final game of the fall when the two schools who comprise our robotics team play each other

Our current setup is in the CD media.
bench prototype It shoots a tee shirt 25 yards downrange with a maximum altitude of 30 feet at a 45 degree angle and internal pressure of 110 psi. Performance is limited by a slow opening valve. We discovered this when we added a second valve to our set up and were testing the timing of the two opening together. We decided the mechanical operation of the pressure diaphram was not going to yeild consistant and tunable results for a simultaneous opening.

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Last edited by Andrew Schuetze : 02-10-2006 at 00:28. Reason: added CD media link