How do balls bounce out of the human player station?

This week I’ve been forced to evaluate the necessity of loading directly from the upper chutes of the human player station. It finally hit me that this depends heavily on how far the balls roll or bounce away from the human player station when they’re dropped in normally. Unfortunately, our team’s field elements aren’t finished yet, so I can’t test this myself. The official field walkthrough videos give some hint, but not enough to draw conclusions from.

So I ask the kind denizens of CD that have finished their mock-up HP stations and fields: how do balls behave when they are dropped into the HP station? How far do balls from the lower chute roll? Do they go up and over the rendezvous point and onto the other side of the field? Do the balls from the upper chute clear the rendezvous point? How long is it before the balls put through the upper chute stop bouncing? Do the left and right chutes send the balls to different parts of the field?

If you have video of this playing out, that would be cool to post, but I would appreciate any observations people have.

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The official FRC field tour videos have one on the loading bay, where you can see an example for each chute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41UgChIeSQw

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Yes, but that doesn’t tell me where the balls end up on the field, just how they look coming out the chute. The ball coming out the bottom chute comes to almost a complete stop before rolling out, but that looks like it could be avoided by loading the ball in differently.

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I just did a quick-ish test on our team-style station.

IF you got a good roll, the ball could go 15-20 feet pretty reliably, from the upper chutes. (Place against the side of the chute towards you.) I’m pretty sure that they’d have trouble at the Rendezvous, though. Bounces stop pretty fast…

If you get a BAD roll–and those are really easy to get on the wooden elements–you MIGHT get about 5 feet, independent of which chute you use.

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