ball dumpers/throwers types

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Travis Hoffman

Since your dumper is confined to quarters snug as a bug in a rug within the very safe confines of your robot's bumper perimeter, consider, all ye gravity fed dumpers, the minimum horizontal distance the balls must travel to find their way into the trailer promised land - the width of your robot bumper, the width of the trailer bumper, and whatever distance lies between the trailer base's edge and its vertical poles. Perhaps a chasm too great to traverse without additional aid....or perhaps not. Either way, something to keep in mind as you design.

That's not necessarily true

[dtengineering]

We finished building our trailer today... if you hit that big centre post with a fairly flat or downwards trajectory and a bit of backspin... it looks like you should score every time.

We've had success shooting the balls 6 to 10 feet just by spinning up an old 8" wheel on a lathe and either dropping the orbit ball on it, or compressing the ball between the wheel and a sheet of plywood.

So I'm thinking one ball at a time, but reasonably rapid fire, similar to 2006.

Jason

[kirtar]

We did about the same thing, but we really just took the big CIM off of our 2006 robot (of course, we won't be using the big CIM...). A problem that I'm seeing right now just because of how the polycarbonate we're using guide the ball down, and with the shaking of the motor being mounted by 1/16" aluminum or something along that lines (might be thinner), the feeding will have to be centered, otherwise the motor may slow down a little bit. We've even had it jam before.

[gorrilla]

why not just build two harvesters and run one in reverse?(HINT HINT)

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

We've had success shooting the balls 6 to 10 feet just by spinning up an old 8" wheel on a lathe and either dropping the orbit ball on it, or compressing the ball between the wheel and a sheet of plywood.

Thanks, Jason, as usual you prototyped our design for us, and found a way to make it work

[JohnBoucher]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

We finished building our trailer today... if you hit that big centre post with a fairly flat or downwards trajectory and a bit of backspin... it looks like you should score every time.

We've had success shooting the balls 6 to 10 feet just by spinning up an old 8" wheel on a lathe and either dropping the orbit ball on it, or compressing the ball between the wheel and a sheet of plywood.

So I'm thinking one ball at a time, but reasonably rapid fire, similar to 2006.

Jason

How much does your completed trailer weigh?

[omgapirate]

One of the ideas that we were considering was an active dumping system which is to say instead of relying on gravity to do our dumping we will have a a dumper which can propel the balls into opposing trailers. Also we will be able to control the dump in case the opponent manages to move out of the way. The design includes two barrels which should increase the rate of fire. It's an early desgin concept that still needs fine tuning but we fell we could take it somewhere.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

We finished building our trailer today... if you hit that big centre post with a fairly flat or downwards trajectory and a bit of backspin... it looks like you should score every time.

We've had success shooting the balls 6 to 10 feet just by spinning up an old 8" wheel on a lathe and either dropping the orbit ball on it, or compressing the ball between the wheel and a sheet of plywood.

So I'm thinking one ball at a time, but reasonably rapid fire, similar to 2006.

Jason

Man, we have a lathe and everything... our students took alot of time to build a roller setup out of 80/20 scraps and a 2008 KOP wheel. The lathe idea is a great idea so we can figure out what rpms to set the spindle motor to!

Our design isn't simply a wheel though, it will be a roller that's 4" wide (or a 1-2" diameter wheel that's 4" wide, however you look at it). I'm also toying with the concept of making it a sort of conveyor design so that the moonrock has more acceleration time. Thoughts?