Our rookie team is finished up and now wants to start designing a tee shirt launcher to attach to our robot after the competition. (One that could shoot tee shirts into a crowd of people at a football game etc) Does anyone out there have any plans on a multishot tee shirt launcher that would be easily attached to a basic robot frame?
Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated on especially the multi-shot mechanism of a pnematic cannon.
Thanks
jalmos
I don’t mean to offend you or say that you are taking the wrong approach, but at least in my experience, it is more productive at this time of year to work on any hold back allowance parts, develop a scouting system, keep working on autonomous code, planning your pit for competitions, and pther work to prepare for competitions. If you already have this covered; you are way ahead of most teams at this time of the build season. If not, I would focus your team’s energy on these tasks rather than starting a new project. I don’t want to discourage you, just warn you about spreading resources too thin like my team has in the past.
In regards to T-shirt launchers, team 254’s is almost always referenced in these discussions. I believe that there was another team (2848) that worked on an automatic reloading system earlier this year. These bots are always good for fundraising/promotional events, so good luck designing and building it.
I am the designer of the aforementioned cannon from 2848. While the depletion of resources is a concern, I feel that practicing the process of building a robot outside of the competition is crucial to becoming a competitive team. (Take something like the SAT for analogy: No one would think that going into the test (a timed, stressful test) without any sort of practice would be a good thing.)
The main goal of building the cannon was not to raise money for our team, instead the main goals were to raise awareness for the club and to practice developing a robot with our newly acquired machining sponsors.
Practice makes perfect
Tee-shirt shooters are cool. My team (3476) made one this last summer using a kitbot frame and compressed air. We brought it to an FLL tournament in Legoland and shot our team tee shirts to the crowd during the awards ceremony. You can see it in the robots section of our website, teamcodeorange.tk .
That was a summer project after our rookie competition, and we really helped show our team to the community and our sponsors that way (we let kids drive it at the Mocrosoft store as well, and became our show time robot along with the minibot!).
Another good idea for the summer, all depending on your resources of course, is to build a drive base of your choice (though probably not swerve or treads for your first year!) with a mentor. I’ve noticed that this helps teams with programming, electrical, mechanical, and even CAD modeling practice.
Have a great robotics summer ::safety::