pic: LAunching mechanism by FIRST

[Andrew Rudolph]

loading photo ...

[Adam Richards]

For the record, this picture was from 2002.

Look familiar to anything else you've seen?

[Andrew Blair]

Umm... Some sort of of end effector?

I wonder if the 2002 game is where they got the inspiration for Aim High. Maybe 2003 is up next. Stack low next year anyone?

[Joe Matt]

Originally Posted by Andrew Blair

Umm... Some sort of of end effector?

I wonder if the 2002 game is where they got the inspiration for Aim High. Maybe 2003 is up next. Stack low next year anyone?

I don't think they got the inspiration there, nobody really used such shooting mechanisms that year, plus it was all about goal controll, not balls. Shooting up 3 feet to get it into a goal is much different than shooting it half court into a goal 8 feet in the air.

[Pat Fairbank]

FIRST demonstrated a shooting mechanism at the 2002 kickoff, so I'm sure they intended for teams to try for long-distance scoring (and to take advantage of the retro-reflective tape on the goals). I suspect this year's height limit was a direct result of FIRST's observation in 2002 that teams wouldn't shoot balls if a simpler alternative existed.

We build a shooter in 2002. It didn't work very well.

[Pat McCarthy]

67's plan in 2002 was to have a shooter, but it didn't work very well, and in the last week of the build we designed and built the kickin' dumping hopper.

[lukevanoort]

Yeah, we had a shooter in '02 as well, didn't work great. I have a video of it getting a few in, but it was almost never used. Quite mysteriously, it shares numerous similarities to our '06 bottom goal shooter. Which might have been a bad thing, that basic design wasn't intended to be aimed. It actually looks almost the same as this one, replace the wheel with a honkin' skyway pneumatic, replace the gear on the end of the shaft with a sprocket, put it on a bit of 1/4 aluminum plate, mount a big CIM with a sprocket on it below the plate, and boom, you have the 587 '06 bottom shooter.