Some of you may recall Team 48’s T-Shirt Cannon robot which debuted back in 2012. Based on 254’s Shockwave, it was a big hit.
We used it for a season and a half, and then the barrel exchanger’s Banebots motor/gearbox broke down. It was buried inside a large aluminum block and we didn’t have the room to replace it with a very much needed larger reduction Banebots gearbox (or the new swanky VEXPro VersaPlanetaries that arrived on the scene), so we set it aside. Painting yourself into a corner is never fun. In the time that our cannon sat idle, two other local teams took the design and iterated it into their own robots. We were like ok, all right, time to get the original cannon on the block up and running again.
We replaced the Geneva wheel barrel exchanger with a simpler chain/sprocket affair and ditched the last thing that gave anyone any indication the cannon started out as our 2010 robot - the goofy drivetrain that should have never been permitted to exist in the first place.
With the help of the new VEXPro 180 degree VP flip kit and a local sheet metal sponsor, we got everything running last week. We still have some programming to do to make the barrel exchanger play nice in semi- and fully-automatic modes, but we’re happy where the bot is at.
We only got to shoot one 8-shirt salvo due to rain, but I made a video commemorating the cannon’s return. Students will probably produce their own video once we have more footage of it shooting with happier programming (and perhaps other forms of soft - and hard - ammunition).
If you don’t like Alice in Chains, you might find the soundtrack’s lyrics disagreeable. I thought the song related to the robot quite well. Ain’t found a way to kill it yet. 
PS - at least to me, this song makes up for me using our marching band playing “Call Me Maybe” in the original video. 