Are any teams planning on shooting the ball?

[Jim E]

Tim,

Gambling already?

This is only week 2. I need a ham sandwich.

[MOE]

HELLOOOooo from the North East
We at TJ2 only have 2 weeks left this will give us time to drive the wheels off TJ2. ( FAST baby FAST) SEEEEEE You Soooooooon !
oh yeah? OH YEAH !!!!!!!

MOE and TJ2

[grantman54]

we have some very impressive results for our launcher. look forward to some videos in coming weeks

[65_Xero_Huskie]

Originally Posted by Paul Copioli

I'll take that bet ....

BTW, the amount of torque that is needed for a 1 meter arm to catapult the ball over the overpass with sufficient margin is 330 Newton-meters ... incase you were wondering.

Hehe, Copioli is my hero (Next to Ken ofcourse)
Im sure team will start posting videos and pictures of their robots in a few wwek, everyone should be patient and wait to see the balls fly..or thrown or pushed..etc.

[Lions for First]

330 Newton-meters thats 243.39551793777 foot-LBS how is it possible to do that with FIRST parts

[MrForbes]

what are these newton meters that you speak of?

how about 200 ft lbs on a 2 foot arm?

[Lions for First]

thats a good idea thanks

P.S. squirrel, we saw your team at the FTC (congrats on makeing it to the finals) and that was an very good robot, and every time my team sees your team we bring it up (in fear)

[Daniel Bathgate]

For a while we were designing a robot that would use a massive spring to throw the ball over... but decided that we like our team members as they are, with limbs. We decided it was simply far too dangerous to continue.

[popo308]

some team will launch it i guarantee you that!

[Maggie27]

Originally Posted by Daniel Bathgate

For a while we were designing a robot that would use a massive spring to throw the ball over... but decided that we like our team members as they are, with limbs. We decided it was simply far too dangerous to continue.

That's EXACTLY what we decided. Hahaha

[Stillen]

wait I thought that <r23423a> prevented us from picking up the ball?

[CodyJ543]

At this point we are planning on using a sort of forklift catapult combo. But from our tests it takes a quite a bit of timing and power to launch those huge trackballs...

[Andrew Schreiber]

I garuntee you that some people's first thought was to shoot this thing. When you get thousands of imaginative kids together with the best engineers around I really doubt anything is impossible.

The only issue with shooting this thing is safety. The most important part in my opinion if you are using springs is not to try to slam them into a hard stop. Slow them down gradually or you will start breaking something. To hurdle requires minimally 22ft/s at the moment of launch.

If a team plans on doing this make sure you tell your members about how dangerous it is. And under no circumstances should you let people near it when it is live. These are 120lb machines, they ARE dangerous. Respect that.

[esisso]

team 1242 is hurdling as well, not launching.......i would like to say that any team that plans on launching should be extremely careful, those balls are heavy coming down and will destroy other robots and you might have 2 disable your device. we dropped the ball from 6.5 feet as if it were coming down from the overpass, i hope for the sake of alliance robots that nobody is under while the balls are knocked down....even worse if it it catapulted up!

[Team 135]

Team 135 has been working on making a spring loaded launch system. We are just starting the testing stage and will repost if we have any new developments.