2022:Shooter

Leaders: Nick V. and Kadence O.

Prototyping - 1/9/2022 - 1/12/2022

We started prototyping how we were going to outtake the Cargo the day after Kickoff. We talked about multiple ways that we could go about it, and decided to begin prototyping a shooter. This shooter would be very similar to our 2020-21 shooter, but scaled up for the diameter of the Cargo. In order to do this, we had to scale up the whole assembly. We made new side plates with even more grooves to increase the amount of contact the Cargo would have on the Lexan "hood" as it traveled around our flywheel. The flywheel is made up of two 4 inch Colson wheels, that are 1 1/2 inches wide and they sit between two flywheels? on a 1/2 inch hex shaft. We originally spun the axle with a drill and fed the balls in by hand to the flywheel, but we might use a CIM motor to drive it for testing purposes.

Prototyping 1/13/2022

We got all of the pins set up for the shooter and did lots of testing. We adjusted the location of the pins to allow for the most contact when it spins along the flywheel. We have also decided that there was a major compression point in the middle of the ball's travel so we moved the pins out to relieve some of that tensions. We found that after that major sticking point was removed, we were able to get more distance on the Cargo. We set up a test with 2 garbage cans (about 3 feet tall) on top of a table (2 1/4 feet tall) with a total of a little over 8 feet. We also set it 17 feet away from the shooter, which is the distance from launchpad to the Hub. After making these changes, we were able to get the distance but not the height. We plan to add a second CIM motor to increase the velocity and hopefully we will get the height we are looking for. We have everything else dialed in to our knowledge, so we think it's isolated to a power issue and one CIM not having the power we need to get the Cargo high enough.