Double Shooter for 2013 robot

[Jonathan Norris]

I would highly recommend spending the time to just make a shooter twice as fast, its probably a more worthwhile exercise. Building a shooter that can shoot 4 discs in ~1.5sec is a challenging exercise that will stretch your iteration skills and programming talent. Every year the thing that separates the best teams from the rest is how quickly they can score, learning how to continuously iterate on your scoring mechanism to make it faster/more effective is a very important skill for any FRC Team.

Between Waterloo and Champs our mechanical and programming teams spent weeks iterating on a new shooter for champs. Using two mini CIMs instead of originally one, we iterated on everything from different speed control algorithms, to hopper designs to make sure the discs stack and fall properly into the shooter, new mechanism to pull the discs into the shooter wheel, and many iterations on the loading trey. This dramatically reduced our shooting time at the pyramid, and served us well at Champs...

[Kevin Leonard]

In theory, a side-by-side double shooter isn't difficult to build- what makes it difficult- especially if you also want floor pickup- is successfully indexing the discs. In addition- you're going to need to design with the number ofmotors available in mind - at least one CIM Per shooter, 4 on the drive train, any sort of drop-down intake will make use of another, etc.

I'm interested to see how your new robot comes out and performs.
Keep us posted on your progress!

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by Thunder910

In theory, a side-by-side double shooter isn't difficult to build- what makes it difficult- especially if you also want floor pickup- is successfully indexing the discs. In addition- you're going to need to design with the number ofmotors available in mind - at least one CIM Per shooter, 4 on the drive train, any sort of drop-down intake will make use of another, etc.

I'm interested to see how your new robot comes out and performs.
Keep us posted on your progress!

There is little reason to use a CIM for each shooter when you have 4 mini CIMs. They are lighter, spin a bit faster, and have sufficient torque. Also, you can spin the shooters off of the same motors, and while your spin up time might suffer, you the time it takes to get all your frisbees out is 1/3 of normal. 3 mini CIMs/2 CIMs powering both shooters will probably be fine.