Pneumatic shooter

[Sriram_Neravati]

Our team is using pneumatics to shoot a ball. We have to clear the frame of our bot and it only passes 60-70% of the time and when it misses it clips the bar a little. How can we change it so that we can get a little more lift.
Moving the pivot point is unfortunately not an optio. Because the belly pan has holes for it and it’s too much work to move. We also have a torsion spring to help it shoot. I was thinking about using surgical tubing to attach to the arm of our catapult and provide a little more elasticity for the shot.

The mechanism is like 118’s 2016 bot we had the same design In 2016 and just went with it this year as well.

[Thequackmaster]

do you have a picture?

[EricH]

Smaller bore cylinders might be your friends here. Smaller bores mean less fill time, which translates into faster travel.

[hrench]

another way to shoot faster with pneumatics is to design the mechanism so it isn’t all the way bottomed-out when ‘cocked’, so there’s a ‘chamber’ in the end of the air cylinder, then, hold it down with a magnet or electromagnet.

When you shoot, the pressure has to get high enough so that the force exceeds the magnet (or you turn off the electromagnet), then then piston will actuate much more quickly than normal.

[MrForbes]

or use an over-center linkage design. Kind of late in the season for some of these ideas, though.

We just use a basket, and a single, small cylinder to raise it up.

[troy_dietz]

Do you have high flow solenoids and a low pressure storage tank after your regulator? Some regulators create worse bottlenecks than others.