How do the Shooters work?

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by PizzmasterP27

As i said, feel free to come and ask any member. We are trying to get everymember involved in answering questions for people too.

Yup, I'll be dropping by a couple pits to scout anyway. I'll make sure I'm the one scouting your robot

[Qbranch]

We evaluated a number of different piston configurations, some of extreme throwing distance and some that were too weak. All of them are completely pneumatic, including the one that's actually on our robot right now.

We ended up using a four small bore piston shooter mounted high atop our robot, as near to the overpass as possible. We used this lower-power-requirement/output shooter configuration because it was faster than a huge pneumatic shooter. With the fast grip/lift on the front and the relatively low air usage shooter on the back, we arrived at the fastest recharge time system we could think of.

Feel free to come by in atlanta, any of our guys would be more than happy to answer any questions... we're easily locateable by the highlighter yellow numbers and robot.

-q

[sayso_411]

Well 384's and 1086's shooter uses 4 Bimba Pistons (i dont remember the technical information but you are welcome to drop by in Atlanta if you are coming to the nationals) that are supplied by 4 Clippard Tanks filled up by our compressor. We have set up our pistons as the hypotenuse of a triangle, the base we adjusted until we got the best horizontal and vertical distance. If you want a pic of the set up check out this link:http://virginiafirst.org/FRC/2008/pr.../target50.html
(You could see the bimbas and the clippards)

[hillale]

Our shooter is really rather simple, but it seems like every time I try and explain it without it available (and even sometimes with) as a visual aide it takes a while to get the idea through to people. It's pretty much a metal "plunger" (flat end on a section of square extruded aluminum) inside of a slightly larger shaft of aluminum, tensioned with surgical tubing, using a linkage setup connected to the center of a decent sized sprocket with a catch on it. The sprocket is powered by a fisher price motor through a dewalt tranny in 1st gear. The linkage is grabbed by a catch on the sprocket on its way by. When "loaded", the linkage is doubled back to about 1/2-1" before crossing center. When the fire button is pressed, the rollers spit out for a second, while the sprocket merely cranks the linkage past center, releasing the potential energy of the surgical tubing in the direction of the ball. Thus propelling it in an upward fashion towards the overpass. Please stop by our pits in Atlanta to see for yourselves. If you didn't grasp the idea from my attempted description. It's really quite simple and elegant. Can't wait to see everyone else's designs!