pic: Mr. Cellophane

[Nuttyman54]

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[Michael Corsetto]

Hey, nice to see the robot from the other side of the school district.

So you shoot into the corner goals, eh? How exactly does that work? It seems hard to shoot balls into the corner goals, considering how short the slots are. I have trouble throwing a poof ball in from 20 feet away. I guess I could wait for the details until the Silicon Valley regional, but I'm not that patient.

Very nice helix storage system. And it says you have a four speed transmission! DANNNNNNGGGGGG dude. Good luck and see you guys at SVR in a couple of weeks.

Mike C.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Be sure to tell us all how the 4 speed turned out. I can see the shift box, but where is your motor input? I only see one CIM motor sitting to the left of it.

Anyway, we decided 4 speeds was a few too many (it would be PIMP with the autoshifter working, but ours seemed to shift every time we moved the sticks), so we went down to a 2 speed blind shifter (same thing, minus the last 2 reductions) and man, does it run ten times better..

[Nuttyman54]

The shooter wheel is actually a 2" roller mounted directly one a CIM. It's hidden by a piece of pressboard mounted about on ball-length from the first ball in the queue. The purpose of the shooter is to allow us to get them into the corner goals w/o having to drive all the way up to them. It hasn't been mounted yet, but we hope to add an IR distance sensor to automatically adjust the wheel speed and get the shots in. We tested with a 1/2 width plywood goal and made 11/13 shots within 3 seconds

As for the transmission, it was orignally designed for the drill motors, so we did some pre- and post-gearing on it to get it back down to reasonable speeds. The CIM you see next to it is geared 1:2 into the transmission input, then geared 1:2 to a stepper shaft mounted above the wheels, and then 1:3 to the wheels. The We got the automatic shifting to work using a 4-slot home-made encoder wheel (mounted on the output shaft). We found the intersection points of the efficency curves (from 33's excellent white paper) for the different gears and applied a histeresis to keep them from shifting too quickly. It will also never go past 3rd gear unless the driver holds both triggers and forces 4th gear.

[Tim566]

how many balls can Mr Cellophane store?

[Nuttyman54]

Originally Posted by Tim566

how many balls can Mr Cellophane store?

about 30 or so in the hopper itself and then another 4 (maybe more) in the pick up mechanism.