Our shooter is powered by two CIM motors, and is relatively powerful. We run the shooter with a talon tracking an encoder in velocity mode.
Despite trying to bring down the recovery period of the velocity after a ball goes through, we can’t seem to speed up… it takes us about a second to shoot each ball.
Is there anything we can do specifically with the talon to help the shooter increase speed and recover? Faster Polling Period? More Current Draw? I realize we might be limited by mechanics a bit but I want to push it to the limit. Takes about 5 seconds to unload 5 balls.
One thing to check is how limited you actually are by mechanics. Right now you’re probably using PID to control your shooter speed, and once your PID is stable at your target speed, you’re activating some mechanism to feed a ball into your shooter.
Try changing the setup: set the shooter to 100%, and only activate that feed mechanism once your speed is greater than or equal to your target speed.
Measure the difference in shots per second between the 1st and 2nd methods to see what improvements are even possible.
yeah. I’ve also wondered if the talon’s current draw is gated or something… if we can configure the talon to allow more power. trying to force the software’s limit
Something that can make a difference here is your reduction from the motor. If you design the mechanism so that the free speed of the mechanism at 12V is faster than you need it to be, you can use make use of more of the motor’s power when ramping up to speed. If you currently have your CIMs at 1:1, and your final shooting speed is ~5500 RPM, then try using a 1:1.5 “upduction” instead. It will draw more current to spin up, but should get up to speed more quickly.
Overdo it and you’ll end up on the wrong side of the power curve, and only make your spinup problems worse.
You have not mentioned whether you have a
flywheel on your shooter. I mention that because adding a flywheel may help reduce the amount of RPM that is dropped with every shot, thus may help reduce your recovery time.