Precision guided launcher turns noobs into pros

a few years ago I made this dis launching Gauntlet it was supposed to make me better at disc off but it just kind of ended up being dangerous I couldn't let that stand so I made [Music] this it's basically a disc bazooka this thing is designed for accuracy it has full control over the speed and spin of the disc and once we get sights on it it should be able to snipe the basket and I'm hoping it can make me as good as a pro it's also insane L powerful it can shoot a disc faster than any human so we'll definitely be having some fun and shooting it at stuff and yes that's a sword I'm also going to show you the trials and tribulations of getting this thing working and you're in for a treat because it was terrible it really wanted to tear itself apart and it refused to work in reality the way that theory said it should so I had to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild it has so many parts now that I have this I think there might be a simpler way to do it but is there a cooler way I don't know this is pretty cool if you're not familiar with this golf it's very similar to real golf except instead of getting a golf ball into a hole you're trying to get a frisbee into a basket the second most important thing to know about Disc Off is you never call it a frisbee it's a disc frisbees are for babies discs are for men and at the end of the day you're trying to get the disc into the basket with the minimum number of throws the discs fly like little airplanes so any variation in wind or how you launch them can make them go to completely different locations in fact I think it's physically impossible to consistently get hole in one so my goal is for this to make me as good as a pro get to the basket in a couple of throws and then snipe it in to do this we need accuracy which means launching discs with very controlled speed and spin so with all this in mind I went back to the drawing board and came up with a completely new design this is my kids Hot Wheel set it's a so my general idea specifically this little box down here has two wheels that rotate in opposite directions and if we push a car into it it launches it super fast this should work with a disc as well this is a mini little fake Disc Off disc watch what happens if we shove it into the wheels oh wow no way oh so close what's really cool is you can make it spin by making one of the wheels go faster than the other but there is a problem there's a limit to how fast you can make a car or a disc go with this kind of setup let me show you what I [Music] mean I've modified the Hot Wheel track to take this die grinder before it was launching cars at maybe 10 m hour on paper this should give us closer to 40 what do you think is going to happen [Music] pretty much the same speed here it is in slow motion do you see the problem the launcher wheels are just slipping the same thing happens when a car does a burnout it doesn't matter how powerful your engine is if you ain't got the grip it's just going to slip but imagine if I took 10 of these launchers and put them in a row the first one would get the car going fast the second one faster and on and on and on it's basically a mechanical rail gun so if we did this and precisely controlled the velocity of all the wheels we could launch a disc with whatever speed and spin that we want all right let's get it made the hardest part of this project is going to be how do I grip the disc I want to put a ton of force into it but it's really hard to do that so this is the simplest possible Arrangement that I could build that will let me try different kinds of Wheels gripping the disc so we're going to just shoot the disc out see what happens go from there so do you think it's going to work here we go [Applause] I probably should have put a little bit more effort into it this is a great example of how destructive vibrations can be I'm going to have to be really careful with this well I'm glad I put the minimum effort into this thing because it stinks remember how I made a big deal about slip yeah if you look closely you'll see the disc bending when it goes between the wheels this means I can't squeeze the disc any harder because it'll just bend more every time I launch a disc you can just smell burning rubber burning plastic so we're slipping we really need a better way to grip these discs the direction I was going in is trying to grip the end of the disc with a V kind of like a v- belt pulley but thinking it through it seemed really hard to do practically but then I was thinking well if we put the wheels on top and bottom that's kind of like a vwh with these I can squeeze pretty much as hard as I want so I can generate an enormous amount of friction we'd still put a set on each side of the disc so we can make it spin but we don't actually need a tire on the bottom we just need something slippery to squeeze against before we can make the whole thing I need to test it I need to see how much grip we can get and see if it can actually work these rollers are the slippery surface we're going to push the disc against I really like how the wheels are folded on top they push the disc through and by driving them different speeds we can still make it spin so hopefully this will suck the disc in and spit it out like it tastes terrible let's see pretty clear the discs just aren't getting any spin they're coming just straight out which makes them very unstable we need the disc to spin so it acts like a gyroscope and resist turning over the wheels driving at different speeds should be able to spin the disc but when the disc goes between two sets of Wheels it's touching four wheels at the same time and it can't spin it gets totally locked you can see how much the tires are rubbing on the disc when this happens I think what I need to do is spread these wheels out so that the disc isn't touching more than two wheels at any given time so we're going to redesign and remake a bunch of these parts to stretch it out like a limo and see if we can get that to work it's pretty much the same thing just slightly different like twins there's enough space between the wheels for the disc to spin freely without jamming up really not a lot to see for so much work but hopefully it'll make all the difference so let's find out okay that is totally spinning it's not perfectly stable but it's way better and we should get more spin with more stages based on the speeds I'm getting out of the test stand I think I need six stages but I'm going to make eight just to be safe the wheels are really hard so I'm going to get them done first this was harder to make than I expected vibration is a huge problem so everything had to be machined extremely accurately and even after all that effort everything had to be carefully balanced I spent a lot of time designing them to be easy to assemble because there's so many of them which really saved my bacon because I ended up rebuilding these things so many times there's a really important detail that I've been glossing over which is how much power we need out of the motors and if you do the math you actually need basically this motor inside of every single wheel and this is the motor that I'm using it is a little bit underpowered every motor will have a chunk of Steel attached to it that looks like this it's called a flywheel this will spin up with the motor and store a ton of energy think of a car that's moving fast or a cannonball once it's going to stop it you have to take all that energy out the neat thing about a flywheel is it can deliver an enormous amount of energy in a very short amount of time kind of like a car hitting a wall it's pretty amazing but this little piece of Steel can deliver as much power as this motor for a couple milliseconds but that's all we need the rest of the machine is really similar to the previous ones there's just a lot more of everything I've actually had this idea for 2 years but I was waiting until I got the water jet because I knew there was going to be a lot of parts like this trying to machine all these in another way would be such a nightmare thankfully a bunch of the parts could be 3D printed because there are so many parts I designed the whole thing to be three modular sub assemblies that combine together like a Transformer to make a mighty launcher this makes it a lot easier to assemble and if I destroy something it's a lot easier to repair do you remember those 5ft subs from elementary school they'd bring to parties that's basically what this is the biggest change is this thing I don't love having a long thing hanging off the back of my disc launcher but I think it's really important we want the disc to come out very repeatably which means we need to put the disc in very repeatably you can imagine if it was angled up or down it'll bounce through the system and come out differently this is kind of like a mini launcher that back and it holds the disc and then when the computer's ready to fire it'll release it and push it nice and straight with some momentum right into the launcher the disc is held back with a trigger mechanism which is really important for releasing the disc when everything is going exactly the right speed and getting consistency it also has handles for picking it up like this it's not that heavy and then electrically there's just basically 16 of everything which was painful and expensive and of course there's knee stop because if things go wrong you want to make them stop going wrong fast although there is a big problem if I turn all the motors on at the same time they're going to be pulling an enormous amount of current trying to spin up their fly wheeels and it's going to be like 400 amps which will just melt everything the battery will explode it'll probably start a really foul smelling fire so I have to do a little more complicated thing where I spin them up kind of one at a time and that should limit the current to something more manageable and then it also has a computer running Linux with a touchscreen which might seem Overkill but I'm planning to add a lot more smarts into this later this is going to give me an interface to make me way more accurate the last thing we need is some software that'll calculate how these motors all need to spin to make the disc go the way that we want it to and there's a lot of different strategies to do this the most obvious way would be to evenly split the acceleration between all the wheels but this doesn't really work because physics the amount of energy it takes to make something go from 0 to 30 mph is the same to go from 85 to 90 mph you might remember the whole 1 12 MV squared thing this is that which counter intuitively means I need each stage to speed the disc up less and less but this should actually evenly spread the load and give me the maximum amount of grip and that's pretty much it it's simultaneously not that bad but also kind of complicated I think it should work but there's really only one way to find out so here we go here we [Music] go all aboard next stop integration hell when you put all the pieces together it never works I started off Strong by blowing up half the motor drivers but even worse it's throwing discs even worse than me I thought we fixed this I see a lot of problems the first is the disc doing this it's not supposed to swim like a whale it looks like the disc's able to dip down between the rollers and then it pops up and then develops a really bad oscillation basically a bucking bronco [Music] so I'm going to try to put a guide right down the middle and that'll hopefully stop it so let's see oh yeah that was way better the guide rails totally work but there's another really big problem that I really don't want to solve if you look at the disc closely it's not really spinning we to shoot it far it's just going to flip over and slam into the ground ask me how I know I think this is because I don't have good control over the speeds that the different Motors go if they're going the wrong speed the disc is just going to do random stuff and this is happening because I'm using cheap motor controllers that have very bad speed control if I tell them all to go the same speed they all go different speeds we could either buy thousands of dollars worth of nice motor controllers or we could do some really annoying engineering that I don't want to do all right so I've been doing some engineering and this is what I came up with what I'm going to try to do is measure how fast each wheel is rotating using one of these this is called a hall effect sensor and it detects a magnetic field so I have one set up right here wire to this light and if I bring a magnet near it it will detect it and turn this light on if we strategically place a magnet on each wheel and put a hall effect sensor nearby it we will see that magnet every time it spins by so now if the motor controller is going the wrong speed we can quantify how wrong it is and compare it to the speed we want it to go and adjust the speed we're telling the motor controller to go until the speed it's actually doing matches what we want we have to install and wire in 16 of these because they're 16 of everything this is getting ridiculous so the hall effect sensors work but it still doesn't work because these motor so watch what happens when I try to go 1,000 RPM which is a very important RPM for me to be able to [Music] go the motor drivers will not go below 2500 rpm so I think the right thing to do would be to get motor drivers that can go the speed that I want but we're in pretty deep now so I think it's time to go full sunk cost fallacy and just try to fix this in software so here's my plan if I want a motor to be going slow when I fire I can just turn it off before I fire and let it slow down and right when it hits the right speed boom you're fired but It's Tricky with multiple motors going different speeds because they need different times to slow down but I can have the computer calculate when to turn each motor off so they all reach the right speed at the same time and when that happens you're fired and when it works it looks like this you have all the motors going a precise speed to make the disc do what we want and it's so cool my wife is here to see what I've been up to what do you think looks been complicated I thought this was going to be easy no I think that I know but I really thought it like it's always think that it's a bunch of Wheels how hard could it be you know there's nothing to it turns out there was something to it you want to press the buttons you see what this thing does oh thanks are you sure yeah you don't want to fire it no how do you not want to fire it I want to see what happens you got to admit pretty cool yeah you look totally normal take it on over to the old disc golf course see what happens you look like a vendor selling uh Wheels instead of hot dogs at a game popcorn get your popcorn all right so you ready to see the future here we [Music] go on buildups you're very sh [Music] off that sounded good goody I know why I thought I was done but instead I got 2 weeks of pain this has been driving me insane it was spinning before now it's not but I think I figured out what's going on it's almost the same thing as before where the disc would get locked between four wheels but it can't physically touch four wheels but I did increase the compression of The Wheels on the disc so now they're making first contact with disc here instead of here which is really good at stopping Spin and I've tried so many things to try to mitigate this but most of them didn't work so we're not going to go into all the details but here's a little taste first I tried to fix it in software with about 10 different disc acceleration strategies they didn't work I tried so many things related to friction and wheels I thought for sure this was going to work but it didn't I also thought for sure this was going to work but it didn't don't even ask you know what really stinks having 16 of everything but I had an epiphany last night and I think I figured it out so let's see [Music] finally you can tell it's working well when the discs drive across the net like a car all of my fixes are based on the idea that it takes a lot less energy to get the disc spinning than moving fast laterally so I'm splitting the boosters into two groups spinny ones not spinny ones the first four stages don't attempt to spin the disc they just accelerate it as fast as possible and then the fifth stage starts at spinning in the last three stages only have a wheel on the left and if you think about it since it's pushing on the edge this will push the disc forward but it'll also spin it and if you only have a wheel on the left side it doesn't lock up so all these things together let me get it going really fast with a ton of spin so one downside with the front wheel Arrangement is that we can only spin the disc one way but I don't think it's a big deal something I want to fix but for now you can make the disc go as fast as you want with as much spin as you want as long as it's clockwise wise all right it's time to touch grass go outside and find out what this thing can do [Music] [Applause] [Music] whoa [Music] wow this is far exceeding my expectations it's possible because I set them low but I'm just firing from the hip with no sights and I'm getting the discs to land really close to each other I can't imagine how good it would be with sights it's also really cool because it's showing how discs launched the same way can fly completely differently depending on their air foil shape but don't forget we can also change the speed and spin this has a huge impact on where a dis flies and is going to be challenging for predicting where discs are going to go all right it's time for more speed so I think we may have found the speed limit I ripped apart one of the wheels and then I fixed it and we ripped another wheel off its rim and then I fixed it and we ripped another wheel off its Rim around 90 mph is where these wheels just say they can't take it anymore this is the sound of the wheel giving up I don't want to destroy everything so I'm going to stop while I'm ahead but we got a few good shots in and we're getting about 450 ft at 9 mph I think I should be able to do better than that but there's a lot of things that can make you go short so the problem I have is that I can't aim this thing because I don't know where the discs are going to go they're like little airplanes and depending on their speed and spin and air foil shape they fly in completely different ways so the first question is if we shoot the same disc in the same way does it go to the same place so I built this really over engineered test stand to prove it to myself I did a lot of testing as expected it can't get a hole in one every time but it's pretty good and sometimes it [Music] can oh and besides if I can get even remotely close to the basket I should be able to just snipe it in we'll have to work on the speed though I don't know how discs fly I'm going to have to make a thing to track the discs so I can get a lot of data and then if I combine that with some software which will show me on a map where it's going to go I can make some really nice sites that should let me play a really good game of disc off this video is already really long so we're going to do that in part two so if you're interested in that make sure that you subscribe so you don't miss it and we're not done yet though because I have a thing that can shoot discs really fast when you have something that can make stuff go really fast you have to put stuff in front of it like I have to know what happens if I put this machete in front of a disc coming out of this we're going to find out I just got up it's way too early to be filming but I wanted to show you what I do every day I think this is one of my superpowers and it can be yours too so let me show [Music] you that's good no matter how busy I get I spend at least 30 minutes a day learning something new this is how I've picked up a lot of my skills and one of the tools that I use for this is called brilliant I use it all the time it works really well and I'm really happy to have it for this video sponsor so let me show you how it works they have a range of Big Technical topics programming AI math data science and they're broken down into literally thousands of lessons and each of these is just the right size to do maybe one or two a day and today I'm doing a lesson on multivariant data modeling I'm not very good at it I'm getting better so let's get into it so it just taught me some Theory and now it's having me do some examples so you learn and then you do which is just the best way to learn it's part of the reason I love making stuff I love doing the examples are also interactive which really helps you build intuition for complex stuff after working through a few more Concepts I'm done I now know a little bit more and I'm telling you this is my superpower spend a bit of time learning every day you will be shocked how much you pick up in a year so if you're interested in leveling up your problem solving abilities check out brilliant you you can try it for free for 30 days just go to brilliant.org stuff here you can also click the link in the description and you'll also get 20% off in annual premium subscription and that's it thank you brilliant for sponsoring this video and thank you for taking the time to check it out all right let's blast some stuff with some discs it kind of goes without saying but don't try this at home and this is exciting enough that I invited my wife over for the festivities are you as excited as I am probably not but I am excited no one knows what's going to happen what do you think is going to happen I think the frisbee is going to it's called a disc it's not going to go all the way through or something I think it's going to be the most amazing thing you ever saw after me with this one you need to go hide outside or something because you don't want an errant disc to the belly I'm willing to take an errant disc to the belly I'll Flex when I fire and we're going to do it in three two one [Music] [Applause] that's got to go on the wall for sure that is cool I was expecting that very cool very cool are you impressed with me yes always are you impressed with this mostly it sliced a disc in half I think this could legitimately make me really good at DIS off if you count using a bazooka playing Disc Off yeah it's not a discreet way to cheat yeah I don't know how you'd hide this under a trench coat or something exactly what I was thinking anyway disc launcher or all right we're done [Music]

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 3,013,387

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Id: t9rClZrbnrQ

Length: 25min 43sec (1543 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2024