My team has decided (for now) on using side/side wheels (or hotdog wheels) for our shooter, instead of top/bottom. That was before seeing all of the Open Alliance stuff, and now I seem to be seeing that pretty much everybody is going with top/bottom.
We haven’t had a chance to test our shooter yet, we’re still waiting on some orders, and so I was wondering if any team had had a good experience with side/side wheels? We’re trying to be able to score from the wing line to minimize cycle times.
I’d be surprised if side-side shooters were effective for wing line shooting. The Notes do not resist compression much at all when squeezed side to side so very large amounts of compression (like 5-6 inches or more) were seen to be necessary to get high-velocity shots. The decompression coming out of the shooter after so much deformation seems to be detrimental to consistent shots. The Notes aren’t a particularly robust gamepiece. With use, the resilience of the foam fades. This would probably cause more inconsistency in side-side shooters where resilience presents a challenge even with new Notes.
We tried side-side and abandoned it after about 2 days of prototyping. Many teams seem to have followed the same path.
Wing line shots are going to be difficult for any kind of shooter. The effective opening for a successful shot is very narrow.
We are having plenty of success with side-to-side shooters, particularly when it comes to shot consistency. Honestly, I feel like a lot of teams are super-focused on shooting their notes as far as possible, but I’ve been putting an emphasis on shot consistency over distance. Speaking of wear, I will be curious how the top-bottom shooters start to fare once the notes become worn out and the foam note top-bottom compression changes overall shot accuracy.
Here’s a video of our (very uncalibrated) shooter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygSnDPTc5bc&ab_channel=seg9585
We have been shooting with two flyweels, left and right (without any software tuning), and only on a prototype board.
We can shoot the note about 22 feet with very reliable consistency and trajectory. That’s about close enough to consider it a wing-line shot.
Some of the levers and knobs you’ll need to tweak:
Compression: We have about 5" total, 2.5" per side
Flyweel placement: We have them raised to be center height/just slightly higher.
Flywheel material: We’re using 4" compliant wheels, but a higher inertia wheel may provide better results (like a colson), we haven’t tried yet.
Flywheel arrangment: If you have more than one set of flywheels, does that change the trajectory? My guess is yes, but we haven’t tested it.
Shooter angle: Our latest rounds of tests were at a fixed angle, 37 degrees. Not because we think that’s the optimal angle, but because that’s where the prototype safely rested.
Our flywheels are being directly driven by Falcons, at about 55% duty cycle open-loop, so somewhere in the ballpark of 50-55 RPS (we haven’t fully measured yet). Changing that to closed-loop may provide both better consistency and possibly more distance.
Hopefully we’ll have a more proper test for that by this weekend.
