Shooter Lag

[Ninja_Bait]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Another more complicated option is to run your shooter at less than the top speed of your motors. The reason it takes longer to spin up is because you're spinning at the top speed of the motor. At that speed, the motor produces zero net torque, and a pretty small amount of torque as it approaches that speed. Less torque means less acceleration, means longer spin up time.

So if you could set things up so that you're only running at, say, 75% of top speed, then your wheel would recover much more quickly. Plus, you'd have a consistent speed for the wheel no matter what your battery level was, since the top speed depends on the voltage you're running at.

The downside is that this is a little complicated to do. You can only do this through closed-loop control of the wheel/motor speed. So you'd need an encoder to measure the wheel or motor speed, and you'd need to set up and tune PID control for the motor speed.

What point in the motor curve would you go for; max efficiency or max power? Or somewhere in between?