Mecanum Drive

[vinnie]

We are having a lot of trouble with our mecanum drive system. We finally got 3 of the wheels to turn incredibly slowly but no one knows how we did it. We have no idea what our problem is. Our code is at http://code.google.com/p/servite-robotics/source/browse/trunk/RobotTemplate/src/RobotTemplate.java if anyone can look at it and help us out. The joystick input is recognized by the robot but doesn't control anything. (In the code it says arcade drive but that is because I commented out the non-working mecanumDrive to see if arcade drive would work but it did not)

[Tristan Lall]

If you guys are relatively inexperienced, I'd suggest taking it step by step.

Install the mechanical components, test the gearboxes individually, and directly connected to a battery, with the robot up on blocks.
Load the default code, see if the cRIO runs it and seems healthy.
Connect the motors to the power distribution system, and install appropriate breakers one at a time (starting with the first Jaguar in the chain if using CAN), testing briefly to make sure it still runs when you connect an additional device. (This will prove that you haven't got issues with improperly-connected speed controllers fouling up the CAN chain, or anything like that.)
Pretend your robot isn't a mecanum system, but instead a 4-wheel drive tank-drive robot with 2 independent gearboxes on each side. Set up the default code to implement that, and then load it and drive around a little.
If everything works at that point, you can say with reasonable certainty that your issue is in code. Then we can really troubleshoot it.

[Robototes2412]

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90080

[vinnie]

The problem was that I set the Jaguars to be speed-controlled, so RobotDrive was trying to set the Jaguars in the range of -1.0 to 1.0, so I fixed it by setting the Jaguars back to default percentVbus control mode.