I’ve seen some pretty rapidly firing shooter videos here on CD that got me thinking. How much time does your team plan to spend shooting during each cycle? By shooting time, I mean the time from when you are done aiming and press the button to shoot, to when the fifth ball leaves your robot.
This time is probably dependent on how quickly your shooter can spin back up to speed between balls, and how quickly you can consistently feed balls. I’m assuming you don’t have to wait for your flywheel to spin up before the first ball since the operator could get it running before you are ready to shoot.
I think the Einstein teams will be aiming for about a second while regional and state champion teams will be aiming for around 2 seconds but this is my first shooting game so I could definitely be wrong. What do you guys think?
With purely mechanical solutions and a simple PID, we were able to recover in 0.5 seconds. We hope to get that closer to 0.1 seconds. Our goal is 0.5 seconds total. We will be mainly limited by our feeder speed, which might be longer.
Still think there can be very competitive teams that take up to 4 seconds. (Especially in Indiana : P )
Currently, we’re thinking about two seconds, but this is more of a choice than a limitation.
The only teams I’ve seen shoot rapidly have been very close to the Power Port. As we are aiming to shoot from a sizable distance, we’re approaching the projectile physics carefully. If the balls get too close in flight, it is likely they will not move as expected, especially over long distances.
As time goes on, I’m sure we’ll adjust this slightly, but playing it safe comes with great benefits.
We’ll be targeting sub 2 seconds from the time we pull the trigger until the final ball leaves our robot. I suspect this time will be pretty close to what most teams at champs are capable of.
Most teams will be limited by the feed rate of their hopper. Elite teams will be limited by the recovery time on their flywheels.
I agree, I’m more worried about getting a consistent but fast feed than the how fast our shooter can shoot. We are also aiming for a sub 2 second time.
Does this include shooter spinup? One of our big issues in 2016 was waiting for the shooter to spin up, which even then seemed unnecessarily long time to wait (usually a few seconds on spinup alone.)
OP seemed to implied we were not considering shooter spin up. We are currently running a 2 falon shooter, so we can get up to speed quite quickly. Unfortunately I don’t have exact numbers.