Horizontal Shooters

[Sachiel7]

I was just curious how many other teams have horizontal style (wheel(s) left to right) shooting mechanisms, mostly for center goal scoring.
An example of ours can be seen here:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=44555

I've seen alot of 1 wheel shooters, or even 2 wheel but upright.
So, why did you choose the arrangement you did?

[Alan Anderson]

We didn't go the softball-shooter route, but if we had, we'd very likely have used a vertical wheel to accelerate the ball from underneath. Backspin on the ball should help give it "loft", making the trajectory somewhat flatter than a plain parabola. That increases both the maximum range and the amount of time it spends at the height where it can make it through the center goal.

[Jonathan Norris]

You can see we went with the same stye horizontal shooter.

as seen:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...453#post459453
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pi...&quiet=Verbose

[Sachiel7]

Yay! We're not alone...
Anyone else have pics?
I'm not sure if anyone got video of our shooter...we'll have to see if we have any and can post it...

[dlavery]

Team 116 has a horizontal-style shooter as well (at least, we think it is still on the robot - it seems we had to go a little nuts with the Sawzall during the last three hours before the robot went in the crate and remove several subsystems, due to some team members being slightly uncomfortable with our 147 pound weight - without the battery or bumpers! <sigh>). Anyway, we do (did?) have a horizontal shooter, and it was working very well the last time we saw it. During testing, it was launching balls half way across my back yard (at 11:30pm - I don't even want to know what the neighbors think any more...). We will see you in Richmond, and can compare notes!

-dave

Our team went with a vertical shooter after much prototyping. However, due to the fact that the balls have topspin coming out of our shooter, our range is slightly decreased. A plus side is our shooter shoots the exact same spot every shot. We may be short range, but we make every shot.

[DanDon]

We chose a vertical shoote, for two primary reasons.

First: It gives us a backspin, allowing us a greater range, and

Second: With horizontal shooters, if the speed of one wheel/drum is slower than the other, then the ball will have a wicked sidespin. With a vertical design, we didn't have to worry about the sidespin effect, and are getting 8-9 balls out of 10 into the goal.

[John C]

Are team went with a two wheel side by side design. We did a lot of testing on different options. Having the wheels up and down did not seem to have much of a difference from having them side by side. We went with side by side because it fit into our design better. To achieve good accuracy you need to make sure that the wheels are spinning at the same speed.

[shamuwong]

During testing, we found that the balls were not uniform in density. One half of the ball would be heavier than the other, making it hard to get an accurate spin on the ball. Also, the balls vary in weight and density from color to color. That was one of the factors we considered when designing the shooting mechanism.

[Wayne Doenges]

We went with a dual wheel, side by side, vertical shooter. We get good range with the back spin. From 17 foot or less we are deadly accurate. At a greater distance we are probably 90 accurate.
We can also shoot the balls at an angle to the goal.

[GaryVoshol]

We went with dual side wheels, mainly for height. We have sensors to tune the wheel speeds.