Baseball Shooter

Continuing on the idea of FRC the next component of our robot was the baseball shooter, which we used to launch the orbit balls to set distances. Normally when used on footballs and baseballs, the wheels on the shooters compress and form around the balls to transfer more linear speed, because of greater friction. This compression is necessary for a successful launch. Unfortunately, the orbit ball is made up of six plastic strips woven together, so the ball would give before the wheels. We used this to our advantage by making a path which was two inches smaller than the ball. This created massive compresssion and created a larger transfer rate of linear speed to speed of wheel. Unfortunately, unlike baseball shooters, this type of shooter would not be able to fire a ball at anything higher than 30mph because the momentum of the wheels is not great enough to sustain top speed when throwing a ball. It begins to slow down as balls enter, because of the conservation of momentum...

I dont really have much more to say, but thanks for reading.
Mark.