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We keep moving. We have had several versions of shooters, but this is the first one worth posting about.

It uses an R/C dune buggy wheel to fire the disk. We purchased a set of these wheels from a local hobby store. The non moving side of the shooter is the top of a sanding block. Both of these materials were chosen because they have very high coefficients of friction with the discs. We have learned that since the discs don’t compress well, it helps if your wheel does so that you can generate force from the compression. Those two values multiplied together give the frictional force that we want so we can impart momentum and rotation to the disc.

We are very happy with this prototype. Since we aren’t planning to shoot from a great distance away, we won’t need more speed than this. We are looking into getting a smaller wheel (1/10 scale instead of 1/8) so that we can further reduce our shooter foot print. We know that the new volume limitations are going to be a big factor in all our designs, so we are reducing size wherever we can.

We mocked up our first VEX climbing robot. The solution to the 30 point climbing problem is coming we just have to keep working at it.

We also worked on our indexer/storage system and it looks very promising. We’re planning to stack the discs like those little foam disc shooters you see in stores. From there we will fire them into our wheel one by one from the bottom of the stack.

Several prototyping parts have been ordered, including our first large order to VEXpro. It’s going to be very fun when everything arrives this week.

We’ve had a great start to the build season. We would like to thank all of the parents who have brought meals and snacks so far it helps us keep up with the late nights.

– Spectrum