Quote:
Originally Posted by Siri
If this is the reasoning, why is it better than swerve?
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1) It's WAAAY more reliable then swerve. We never once had any major issue with our butterfly drive train this year (with the exception of breaking an omni during practice because we ran over a floor power outlet. We can also lose pneumatics (such as we did in final matches #2 & #3 at North Star and we can still drive just on omni's. If we lost an encoder with the swerve drive (ie. got unplugged), which happened a few times too many last year, we couldn't drive and it took some power cables with it.
2) It's WAAAY easier to fix then swerve. To fix a butterfly module, all we had to do was to unbolt 1 bolt and we could easily change out the module ("plug-and-play" if you will). We would just have to remove 2 additional bolts to get to the actual drive train itself. Now to fix the swerve drive, we had to work in crammed quarters trying to unbolt a bolt (which wasn't fun) and to fix wiring issues.
3) It's WAAAY simpler. The mechanics behind the butterfly drive is so much simpler then the mechanics behind the swerve drive. The fabrication and assembly of the butterfly drive was much quicker than the swerve drive. We were able to machine the parts for our butterfly drive ourselves because they didn't need to have that much precision vs getting precision lazer cut parts at our sponsor for our swerve drive modules. Assembly time was MUCH faster (~2 hours to assemble 10 butterfly modules vs 9 HOURS PER swerve drive). It's worth noting that the programming behind the swerve drive is quite complex versus the simple coding required to drive the butterfly modules. It's this simplicity that makes butterfly drive more reliable and easier to fix than the swerve drive.
4) It's WAAAY lighter and smaller. Each swerve module weighed ~6 pounds vs the ~1-2 pounds per butterfly module. I can easily hold 2 butterfly modules in my hands vs 1 large swerve module. Our chassis was also 'designed' to easily accomodate the butterfly modules.