This bot was created as an offseason project for our team. It is 100% student designed and is the result of many weeks of hard work. That being said, we’d love to get some feedback from you all, as there’s always more to learn and improve upon.
Notable features:
An 8 barrel revolver style launching system inspired by 254’s Shockwave
Barrel indexing using a limit switch triggered by nubs on the rotating barrel assembly
Up/down tilt powered by a mini CIM and Andymark wormbox
A powered turret with 90 degrees of rotation in either direction
8 wheel drive, with the middle 4 dropped 3/16"
2 2 CIM WCP gearboxes
No PVC parts anywhere near this robot
We are still working on the pneumatic setup. One scuba tank will act as a high pressure reservoir, and the other will be our low pressure accumulator. The accumulator goes to an electric solenoid valve which feeds to the shooter. We don’t have much experience with scuba regulators and non-FRC pneumatics, so all suggestions are welcome and appreciated.
254 inspired indeed. We liked the idea of a revolver, but wanted to mount it on a turret for an additional degree of freedom.
We are still researching which solenoid valve to use. We are looking for something with a very high flow coefficient (unfortunately these aren’t always published).
Nope, just a WCP DS gearbox. We weren’t too worried about running out of compressed air
Probably not a surprise, but look for a large-bore valve with a metal (probably brass) frame, and plumbing of the same or larger diameter from the accumulator through the valve tp the barrel. Using a 3/4 to 1 inch airway will let you launch shirts to the top levels of a high school stadium (or over them) from the sidelines with no more than 60 psi.
Just curious, how are you compressing your air? We’ve been using a scuba tank, using a standard scuba regulator to get down to around 100psi and an FRC regulator to get down to 50-60 psi in a cast iron accumulator we picked up our rookie year. We get at least 200 launches from a tank, probably more like 400-500 when we programmatically regulate the valve time. If we were to ditch the scuba tank, we would probably have a high-pressure (120+ psi) tank that we charged using 110VAC and continue with the cast iron accumulator to reduce the number of battery changes.
Large hoses at high pressure are going to have large bend radii. Note also that these sort of hoses do not take twisting well.
We eventually took out the freedom of a rotating turret so we could plumb everything with galvanized pipe and fittings. We looked in to swivel fittings, but at this size, the cost got out of our air cannon budget, especially for dry (non-lubricated) air.
