pre-charged Pneumatics

[Daniel_LaFleur]

Originally Posted by eagle33199

Everyone really should have a safety lock available anyways. If you are going to be carrying the robot on or off the field with any mechanism "charged" and ready to fire, it needs a secure lock in place to ensure that any jostling doesn't result in someone getting kicked in the gut and dropping the robot on their foot. That is a simple safety practice that every team should have (I would even go so far as to suggest that inspectors should fail teams without it) that can easily prevent real injuries.

Which leads to a question for Al... If a team had such a safety lock that was removed from their robot after placing it on the field, could they use it during the sizing part of inspection, but remove it when weighing the robot? If the safety lock is a few pounds for something real sturdy, it could make a real difference when being weighed.

I've always told my team to release the air pressure before lifting the robot off the field. It makes the robot that much safer and doesn't take that much time.

[Jon Stratis]

Ahh, but not all mechanisms are "charged" with air pressure. Teams that utilize springs or surgical tubing with a motor to charge their kicker may, depending on design, leave the kicker in a charged position when the robot is off, while having no pneumatics at all! And other teams will pressurize their robot from the cart in order to save weight (not have a compressor on their robot) - in such a case, you would have to carry it onto the field charged.

[dtengineering]

FIRST provided some good safety guidelines for precharged devices (and this forum came up with some more) a couple years ago for the trackball launchers.

Mind you... if your ball kicker has as much energy stored up as a trackball launcher, you ought to be able to kick balls up into the stands.

My estimate so far is that we are using about 1/4 the force and about 1/2 the stroke on our pneumatic kicker that we did on our pneumatic launcher.

Jason

[joek]

Everyone really should have a safety lock available anyways. If you are going to be carrying the robot on or off the field with any mechanism "charged" and ready to fire, it needs a secure lock in place to ensure that any jostling doesn't result in someone getting kicked in the gut and dropping the robot on their foot. That is a simple safety practice that every team should have (I would even go so far as to suggest that inspectors should fail teams without it) that can easily prevent real injuries.

Which leads to a question for Al... If a team had such a safety lock that was removed from their robot after placing it on the field, could they use it during the sizing part of inspection, but remove it when weighing the robot? If the safety lock is a few pounds for something real sturdy, it could make a real difference when being weighed.

one of the big reasons they put the weight restriction on is because team members are going to be carrying the robot, it's a safety issue.