One or Two Wheel Shooter

[Nitroxextreme]

I'm sure that alot of people have varying opinions on to which type of wheeled shooter is the most accurate/ most powerful.

I was just wondering as to which design you believe is the best and why

[agndoggieboi]

it depend on whether u have enough room. a one wheel shooter takes less room den a two wheel shooter. it really depends on ur design of everything else. so hope i helped

[KenWittlief]

A one wheel shooter has a couple advantages:

1. only one motor/drive to control, instead of two wheels that must be synchronized

2. two wheels grab a ball and accelerate it 'instantaniously'. We know from the laws of physics that is impossible, so either the wheels must slow down as it grabs the ball, or the ball must be ripped or skidded to some degree. With a single wheel you can feed the ball into the capture zone so it rolls into it at an accelerating rate. This eliminates the need for instantaniously going from 0 to 12M/s.

3. one wheel puts a repeatable spin on the ball. Depending on how the ball hits the target this can be usefull, so the ball will spin itself into the goal.

[Andrew Blair]

Ah, this is is the biggest discussion our team is having this year. Lets see if I can show both sides of the argument:

1 Wheel-
Simpler
Gives a nice backspin on the ball
Can take up less room
Probably a slightly slower throw
Favorite of commercial ball throwers

2 Wheel-
Possibly some more velocity on the ball
With the proper setup, a side-spin or axial spin can be introduced
More complex, needs two motors or a gear/belt/chain linkage
Favorite of Physics students (Inside joke)

Now, it really comes down to which one is more accurate. You need a prototype to do this. If they're equally accurate, it depends on how much space/resources/engineering prowess you feel that you can put into it. We'll have throwers tommorrow, so we'll know then. Hopefully.

[Sgraff_SRHS06]

We're also using a one-wheeled launcher. For us, it was mostly a question of how robust and simple the design was going to be rather than a versatile complex one. The mechanism, tenatively is that single wheel, but we hope to use it not just for hurling balls into the center goal, but also harvest balls and shoot [balls] into the corner goals.

I don't know how that's going to work yet, completely. But I am pleased to know that it does NOT involve pneumatics.

[sciencenerd]

You have to remember, with a single wheel the RPMs must be twice as high as a double-wheel design to get the same ball end velocity. Not to say that it takes twice as much power, just that you will have a faster-spinning object on your robot, which is potentially a safety hazard. Something to think about.

[sanddrag]

Let's just wait until we see the video from one SoCal team I have in mind.