[dtengineering]

I'm glad to read that more HS300 balls are on their way. We just had a couple of HS500 balls delivered yesterday and they are, as Jim says, very glossy and their surface finish definitely has a lower coefficient of friction on carpet than the old, beat up ball we were originally testing with.

That said, I'm not sure how long the pristine surface finish will last... probably quite a while, so long as we don't subject the balls to the vicious high speed ball grinder that our first prototype "backspin roller" turned out to be. Who knew AM wheels could melt soccer balls?

A lower speed, higher friction approach appears to work better, and we've had good success using the intake roller off last year's robot with both the new and older balls (about 2" diameter Al tube with McMaster round belting on it, driven by FP motors on a 64:1 reduction, as I recall)

But several soccer players have commented on how glossy the balls are... I'm glad we now have a standard to base our designs on... we'll inflate one ball to 27" circumference and another to 29" so we can test kicking and control at both inflation extremes.

Jason