Changing the Shooter (AGAIN!) and Programming Bonanza: Week 5

This week was full of progress on the programming and some anti-progress (if that's even a word) on the shooter.

Though we seem a bit indecisive, changing the shooter again is probably the best decision we've made this far. The double flywheel shooter that we had built before was super super super super inefficient (I hope you can grasp how super duper inefficient this system was). We only figured this out now because we had been working on the programming very hard (more on that later) and could finally test it. The ring only launched a couple of feet, which is not nearly enough to make it into even the low tower goal from behind the launch line. Why was it so slow? Whelp, you might remember that complicated drive shift parallel we made to attach both wheels to the same motor; that was the problem. All the energy was lost in getting those gears and sprockets to move, and the flywheels just didn't spin fast enough. The solution? Only one flywheel. Yep, that's right, back to the original design with one flywheel (wow, we seem as inefficient as the double flywheel).

Don't worry going backwards is not necessarily a bad thing; it's part of the engineering design process. You get an idea, test it, and if it doesn't work, you go back to the drawing board for new ideas. We just happened to chose the idea that didn't work to test first.

The single flywheel shooter is much less complicated.

The new flywheel, however, was a HUGE booster to our motivation. Not only did it shoot harder, it was so much easier to put together, adjust, and program.

The new shooter can even shoot into the high tower goal.

And speaking of programming...our programmers got a lot (and I mean a lot) of programming done. We configured the movements of the drive train, wobble goal claw and arm, shooter, and the beginnings of the intake ramp to the driver remote controls. With all this progress, we can finally start testing and tweaking next week.

Programming gets a little crazy with wires going everywhere.