Flywheels and Shooter Wheels

[JesseK]

Flywheel vs PID control was the biggest unknown we had this season, so we decided to make our shooter as flexible as possible.

I CAD'ed tight-tolerance plates that would bolt onto the side of our 8" IFI wheel using the pre-existing holes, and then had 12 of them watercut out of 1/4" plate. This gives us a total of about ~3.5 lbs in flywheel weight in removeable increments of ~0.6lbs. We haven't actually taken any of the weight off yet because the balls are extremely consistent distance-wise. We have yet to test integration of the software PID, but as a backup we also have human-in-the-loop control via a tactical display.

We have a 2.5 second spin-up time to ~2000 RPM (from the key), but the wheel can aggressively spin up to 3600 RPM in under ~1.5 seconds if we let the motors run without the trapezoidal speed profile.

During initial testing the wheel only spun down about 20% (200RPM-ish) while compressing the ultra-squishy balls 1" and could return to the target speed in about 1 second. We didn't measure spin-down of stiff balls with 0.5" compression, but the distances were the same. We have this ridiculous test & integration plan to figure out compression, PID adjustments, flywheel weights, driving constraints and what the actual balls will be on the field. If I'm not exhausted after tomorrow's practice, I'll report back some actual #'s.