Ready the Artillery

By Max

Task: Design a bowl for our upcoming catapult system

We've been experimenting with catapult systems for a little while now, but we're still sorely lacking one of the core ingredients of any catapult system: the ability to throw things. I mean, technically we're lacking the ability to hold what we're trying to throw, but it's the same effect.

In any case, it's an issue we have to deal with, and our solution is good ol' nylon. I went through a few designs for a bowl to hold balls, and the one we're using is pretty much a semicircular shell with a handle which mounts to the arm of the catapult and plenty of holes to lower the weight while keeping it sturdy.

(herecomedatbowl.jpg)

Reflections

The bowl is a great fit for the ball and doesn't seem to interfere with the strength of the catapult, but there are still two issues which we can't address yet.

Firstly, we haven't gotten a loading mechanism planned out yet. We can make the catapult as strong and reliable as we want, but beyond the first ball we're allowed to load for autonomous, it won't do us any good until the robot can actually take balls from the floor and load them into the bowl. That might not seem very pertinent to the design of the bowl, but since it's the only physical interface between the loading mechanism and the catapult, it'll be the first thing to change if the two don't fit together on the first try.

The second issue is just that cleaning out the printed model is an utter pain. Again, this is no reason to change the model right now (and it probably won't be one later on, either), but since we're likely to have at least one more version in order to solve whatever issues we encounter while developing the loading mechanism, there's at least a 90% chance that another catapult bowl will need to have its support structure gouged out over the course of an hour. I just feel sorry for the poor bugger who has to do it.

Yeah, it's probably gonna be me.