571- Final Kicker

[Jones571]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0_i3hbVNY

Here is what team 571 has come up with for our final kicker. We use 2 6'' Pneumatic skyway wheel's as our ball magnet. Our kicker started as a prosthetic foot but due to packaging issue we settled on an 842 inspired design that packages very well around the wheels. we now use 7 wraps of surgical tubing from the upper part to a cross bar. We are now consistently getting a distance of 22-24 feet with this set up. We pull it back with a 1.5'' cylinder with 4.5'' of stroke and preload with a standard gate latch. The best part if you watch around the 13-14 second mark is the amount of arc we get with the rollers on. When they are off we get a lower trajectory which is also nice. Looking down the blue stripe is the 3'' of intrusion, Silver is our bumper zone, and green is outside of our bumpers. This was the best way for us to allow the kids to visualize as we kept trying different concepts.

[waialua359]

Looks great. I like how you folks were able to engineer everything in place, especially the roller magnets.

[Jones571]

were finishing cading and the last mock-ups today and tomorrow, but it is a very tight set up so far.

[=Martin=Taylor=]

I'm very interested in how the ball magnet is affecting your range.

Why do you supose the spinning is losing you two feet?

[Jones571]

the short answer is trajectory and back spin. higer speed the higher the ball will travel with less distance less spin lower it travels with a little better distance. we will spend more time playing with it once we have it on the "honey i shrunk the kids diet" and get it in our practice chassis.

[Smoores]

we have similar rollers mounted on our robot. Try running the wheels in reverse (giving it topspin) that significantly increased the range.

[Jones571]

Originally Posted by Smoores

we have similar rollers mounted on our robot. Try running the wheels in reverse (giving it topspin) that significantly increased the range.

Thanks for the advice but that also will push the ball away from the robot and kicker. As we have not reached the limit of the cylinder we are going to put on a few more wraps of surgical tubing.