Skeet and trap thrower Robot help

Community General Discussions
1

Hi, I am very experienced when it comes to RC Plane/Car/multi-copters stuff and I am also a computer developer…but I have never done any programming on robotics.

I have a skeet/trap shooting range on my land (if you don’t know what that is, just youtube it). I have two clay pigeon throwers that weigh about 100 pounds. Currently they are stationary and throw the pigeons the same way every time. We’ll, one of the throwers rotates left and right at random to make things more interesting. Here is a link to them championtarget.com/traps/rec … ubles.aspx

The project I have at hand is to create a way to control them (hopefully with my rc plane controller) to be able to move them left, right, up, down. I have the throwers on a “lazy Susan” type base so they move manually left and right, I also have the ability to manually change the angle in which It throws higher and lower(there is a pivot that is balanced pretty well. Since it is balanced well, it doesn’t need a ton of force to move it, but when the clays are being thrown there is a lot of force generated that would tear a small servo the pieces. Since the throwers weigh 100lbs, I can’t use my simple servos that I use for my planes, I need more power.

I have radios, receivers, batteries, DC brushless motors, servos, ect.

So, what I am looking for is…what should I buy to build this thing?

My first though was to use a linear articulating arm to move it up and down and just hook it up to my rc plane receiver. And then to use a dc brushless motor with a speed controller to move the thing left and right.

But I think that the articulating arm will be very slow (I am looking for about 6 inches of travel)

Help me think out of the box on this one. I want to come up with something sweet.

2

Interesting project! Your main issue will be what happens if you leave the setup outside, since almost none of the actuators we sell are water resistant and would be affected by rain, high humidity, very cold temperatures etc. If you could store them indoors in bad weather, we have a few easy solutions:

If you want to control actual position rather than speed and direction, you’ll need a linear actuator with built-in potentiometer such as:
robotshop.com/en/6-stroke-15 … meter.html (needs a separate controller such as the LAC to operate using RC commands directly)
LAC: robotshop.com/en/firgelli-te … board.html
robotshop.com/en/servocity-h … r-8in.html (accepts RC commands directly so you can literally plug it into your RC receiver and a 7.2 to 12V power supply and it will work).

You can use one actuator for the base in a sort of “rack and pinion” approach (this would limit the angle a bit, but the closer to the base you mount the actuator, the more travel you’ll get).
The second one can be mounted between the base and the pivoting arm.

2x RC linear actuators
1x power supply (12V perhaps)
1x R/C transmitter and receiver (which you already have)
Custom mounting.

3

Great advice, i am buying that stuff now