pic: KRUNCH 16 Hanging at Orlando

[KRUNCH DUDE]

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[Lil' Lavery]

Care to share any details about how you transfer and load discs from your accumulator and your shooter?

[Andrew Schreiber]

They run down the hopper with help from the belting. They are held out of the shooter by polycarb fingers. The plunger cylinder kicks them through there then there is a firing cylinder that propels them into the shooter wheels. It's an annoyingly complicated process which is why there were misfires and jams a couple times early in the regional. We have sensors in place to help us automate the process but we didn't feel the autoload code was up to par yet so we ran manual operation. When the autoload system works it always keeps a disc in the chamber ready to fire if we have one. This drastically simplifies the driver operation. We're working out some bugs with the code between now and DC.

With the exception of the hang system pulling us up the whole system runs at 30psi to conserve air.

At Orlando the shooter wheels were running full open loop control but the driver had a cross hair on the driver station to help line up. However, we found shooting from only a few choice spots was better for accuracy.

[D.Allred]

Erik,
We enjoyed competing against KRUNCH at Orlando. Your machine definitely got that cannon dialed in by eliminations.

Good luck in St. Louis!

David

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by D.Allred

Erik,
We enjoyed competing against KRUNCH at Orlando. Your machine definitely got that cannon dialed in by eliminations.

Good luck in St. Louis!

David

Wait until DC. We may upgrade it to an artillery piece

[Eric Yahrmatter]

We were using a storage system eerily similar to this, but it jammed all the time. All I will say is that the orange Home Depot 5 gallon bucket fixes all...

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Eric Yahrmatter

We were using a storage system eerily similar to this, but it jammed all the time. All I will say is that the orange Home Depot 5 gallon bucket fixes all...

No real jams but we weren't happy with the performance. Interestingly, we were just talking about making a trip to Firehouse to get a pickle bucket.

[Calvin Hartley]

Am I the only one wondering what the 16 in the thread title means? (sorry if it's obvious...)

[Jacob Paikoff]

Originally Posted by Calvin Hartley

Am I the only one wondering what the 16 in the thread title means? (sorry if it's obvious...)

Thats the 16th Captain Krunch robot (really its 15 but I don't want to talk about that). It also marks Krunch's 16th season in FRC.

[Calvin Hartley]

Originally Posted by Jacob Paikoff

Thats the 16th Captain Krunch robot (really its 15 but I don't want to talk about that). It also marks Krunch's 16th season in FRC.

Gotcha. Thanks! The robot looks pretty slick.

[apalrd]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

We have sensors in place to help us automate the process but we didn't feel the autoload code was up to par yet so we ran manual operation. When the autoload system works it always keeps a disc in the chamber ready to fire if we have one.

Andrew, you just need a good state machine and a lot of calibration. We ended up with 2 sensors (plus gun speed and gun speed accel)

I wanted to attach a picture of our old state machines, but it won't let me.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by apalrd

Andrew, you just need a good state machine and a lot of calibration. We ended up with 2 sensors (plus gun speed and gun speed accel)

I wanted to attach a picture of our old state machines, but it won't let me.

That's pretty close to what we had. I wasn't happy with how the system behaved at the edge cases (no matter how rare they were) and our operator was able to operate within acceptable tolerances so we didn't worry about it. Basically, we made the decision to be slightly slower at firing in exchange for not relying on software that wasn't 100% tested.