Cushioning Your Hard Stop

[Ikillee]

Our pneumatic cylinders for the shooter is mounted on the robot through holes in the frame and coder pins. When the cylinder comes to a stop, there's stress on the frame and on the cylinder to extend farther. What is a catch strap and how will it help?

[DampRobot]

We have 6 1/8" thick rubber washers dampening our shooter as it hits the forward stop. The shooter plate still audibly rings when it stops going forward.

We've also seen the need to be really conservative with material strength in shooters, in addition to adding dampers. We originally had some 1/4" and 1/8" plate in some places that we wouldn't think would see much static load, and essentially no shock load. After seeing rather frightening deformations (15 degree or so bends in 1/8" 6061 and noticeable bowing in 3/8" 6061) we decided to beef everything up from 1/8" to 1/4" and 3/8" to 3/4". As of yet, we haven't seem any significant deformation as a result of strain, but were still not very far into the season...

[Doug G]

We tried a bunch of different things and finally decided on this...

[TheKeeg]

Our team originally had designed and built a hard stop that was linked to the winch, but bad things happened...very bad things. So, on bag day we had an idea to use the same tubing that was powering the catapult to stop it. It worked great. Now, it does oscillate a little bit after shooting, but it doesn't for long because our tubing is so strong. The robot is taking the same amount of force, but it is doing it in a much longer time period (impulse). No more exploding versa planetaries (oops did I just say that)

[nxtmonkeys]

Here is my cable hard stop. I don't have any real pictures, but I used PAINT to make this.



I'm getting a real picture of my cable put up on the portal right now.

[nxtmonkeys]

Never mind. i'l have it later.