At Dallas we were able to do something very fun - bolt on a system we made the weekend prior to competition that allows a non-shooting (or low/middle goal shooter) to dump 3 extra discs in our loader, allowing us to shoot for an extra 18 points. An example is at the beginning of the video above. It was very exciting to do in Dallas and we’re looking for any teams at Champs that may be willing to do this with us, should we end up on the same alliance.
An ideal robot to do this kind of thing with is either:
- a robot that can already dump into the 1 point goal (1 disc at a time) as our loader is the same height as the low goal
- a robot that has some kind of bar of sorts approximately 35" off the ground that we can put the dumper on
- a robot that has a profile low enough to put the dumper on a couple of 2x4s to raise it to about 35"off the ground. We were able to do this with a couple of teams that did a 10 point hang without interfering with their climb.
As far as programming the autonomous, we can help you very easily add labview code to turn a servo to dump it after 6 seconds. If you don’t use labview, we’ll need to rely on your team to add the code.
The system itself is pretty light, and most of the robots that are ideal for this are light enough that it’s not an issue. If teams are interested and are heavier bots, I’ll get a more precise weight.
Thanks for reading and good luck to everyone at Worlds! I am so excited for matches, there are a lot of really great teams this year.