Beater Bar V3 Improvements

By Darshan

Task: Improve BeaterBar V3

Today we came up with a new attack angle for the beater bar. This new angle allows for greater accuracy for picking up the the large balls but missing the small ones. We also added a temporary mounting area for our NXT and wired up the beater bar motor so it would not get snared when the ramp deploys.

Reflections:

We have also finalized our plan to not pick up the smaller balls and have a large amount of speed and accuracy picking up the larger balls. This is risky. We think many other teams might be following the same strategy because of how much more efficient the large balls are for racking up rolling goal height points. If so, there will also be a lot of competition for the limited number of large balls on the field. Here are some tests:

Collecting large balls

Rejecting small balls

Our plan is to mount the NXT higher up on the side shields on the robot so it is protected but also accessible during the tournament. But we can't really do that while we are changing the ball handling mechanisms as much as we are. We don't want to be removing the shields constantly while we build.

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