The plans to use a gas gun to launch the 'fish food' suffered from a fair bit of variation in pressure.
It's still a fun idea, and I've got a bunch of threaded CO2 cylinders so I'll come back to it some time... but I've realised I better get a shift on as I have to get the video done by the start of March.
So I did a quick test print to see if I could make a simpler, more predictable launcher. Basically a bunch of cups on a servo arm which flicks through 90 degrees and sends the nerf balls flying...
But the servos I have are all a bit too slow unless I used some kind of accelerator mechanism. I thought about sticking a cam lobe on the servo.
I looked at Thingiverse to see if there were any such linkages I could copy, and found a couple of things that looked more like bowling machines.
In theory that would be more controllable than a pivot as the motor speeds can be set exactly, and dialled in based on the distance from the 'fishbowl' which we can get from either an ultrasonic SR04 sensor, or an i2c IR laser sensor.
I've dug an L298N speed controller out of the shed which should be up to the job of spinning a couple of tiddly motors.
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