pic: FRC Team 1501 T.H.R.U.S.T. presents

[Chris_Elston]

Originally Posted by carpedav000

Man, those pesky defense bots

On a more serious note, is there any particular reason why the boulders spin while you are driving around with one? From what I saw it also happens when the turret isn't tracking.

Ha ha...1741...BTY...I'd like to point out, that was AWESOME that we agreed on the "Sally-Port Agreement". I hope you was able to do that in your next match as well.

Wow...very observant! Actually we call that "pop-corning" the boulder. On Saturday when the boulder was in the indexer and made the ball sensor, it did that automatically. On Sunday, we changed it to only popcorn when we the shooter wheel is spinning, so it was stationary on Sunday.

The reason was to eliminate driver error of position the boulder correctly on top and ensure that the boulder was still not captured in the harvesting rollers. So by pop-corning the boulder, it's rolling up on top of the harvesting wheels, frictionless, so when we launch the boulder with our air kicker, it's consistent when it hits the shooter wheel. If it was pinched on the top intake roller wheel, the air kicker will still get it out, but the exit velocity was different. So we found it best to keep the boulder rolling to make sure the shot was consistent each time.