What's the concept?

[jspatz1]

1. Relentless design iteration.
2. Motor power.
3. Tight/close disc containment/control. The only way to make an object behave the way you want it to at high speeds is to exert tight, forceful control over it.

[Mr. Lim]

I can't speak to the mechanical aspects, but we use a velocity PID with feed forward. We also use a Banner optical sensor to measure wheel speed. The result is we can hold wheel speeds to within about 1% of our target. The gearing on the motor basically puts the shot recovery right through the middle of the power curve.

Our feeder has an "auto-fire" trigger where the operator holds down the trigger, and the code detects when the shooter's wheel speed has recovered, and automatically fires the next disc.

There's quite a bit of good information on ChiefDelphi about feed-forward and optical sensors/encoder jitter, particularly since the last two games have depended on spinning wheels to launch game pieces.

And yes, iteration is key... Zeus, Marley, Cyclops, Snowman, Enterprise, Mini-Cyclops were just some of the codenames of our prototype shooters - and each one had a series of their own iterations.