pic: Micro Swerve Module Drive Train

[micro]

This is incredibly well done. I hope you put the CAD up so others can see what you did. I'm trying to teach the new freshman to Cad and this is the perfect example of what I hope they can do someday.

[Andrew Remmers]

Originally Posted by Taylor

Maybe I'm missing something. VEX offers a swerve drive kit; one could easily be built with 5 or 6 motors.

Yes I am aware of this fact but the level of dexterity and flexibility required by NARs robot designs needs something far more space efficient. We have yet to find a decent acceptable way of doing a swerve without adding lots of interestingly complex mechanisms to allow us to get the same performance out of a swerve compared to one of our x holo drives or tank drives.

I've been wanting to build a vex swerve for a while and I'm sure it will be done eventually just so far we haven't been happy with our solutions to the problem yet.

[Taylor]

Sorry, my comment wasn't meant toward the OP. It was directed toward the people who were asking about swerve use in VRC.

[Brandon Zalinsky]

Any idea what the weight would look like for this?

[Andrew Remmers]

Originally Posted by Flak-Bait

Any idea what the weight would look like for this?

This set up here is roughly 37 lbs (including some left electronics left out of the render) Those electronics consisted of enough talon motor controllers to power the machine. They were removed because polygon counts were through the roof.

[runneals]

Originally Posted by Mk.32

Everytime I see a new swerve drive design on CD I just wanna build one even more so...


One of these days...

Swerve is cool, but you have to have a need for it to make it worth while... We did it our first year before I got on our team, and our drive team didn't use it to it's full potential.

Look at all your options for drive trains and pick the one that fits your needs, not the one that just looks cool or the one with the awesome bells & whistles.

[smartkid]

Cody here (the guy who rendered this).

I made the VRC animations Clean Sweep and Round Up.

This render was made with 3ds max 2014 using the mental ray renderer. It utilized three of my four rendernodes which each pack 2x Intel Xeon i7 E5540's + my 4.3 GHz (OC) i7 2700k workstation. Even with all that power this render took a very long time to complete (I ran it overnight).

This isn't surprising, it's a 4k high quality render with DOF and a large trace depth. Believe it or not I've had worse renders. This render of the Toss Up field featured segmented shadows, caustics and volumetric lighting - even @ 1080p it took the entire farm over a day to render.

Andrew's work has always been amazing, rendering it has always been fun.

Regarding the PNG, that is the raw file 3ds generated. It's so big because it's a 16-bit image not an 8-bit like traditional graphics (IE 16 bits per color channel not 8). My 10-bit monitor can display some of this advanced color depth. I gave Andrew the whole image because why not? Fun fact, mental ray actual computes in a 32-bit color-depth.

But yeah a more web-optimized version could be made, PNG or JPEG - doesn't really matter, I like PNG better.

-Cody

[BBray_T1296]

If those red gears are made from plastic like I think they are, shouldn't you be worried about stripping them? they seem awfully thin...

[Andrew Remmers]

Originally Posted by BBray_T1296

If those red gears are made from plastic like I think they are, shouldn't you be worried about stripping them? they seem awfully thin...

They are made from AL, They are also a sensor gear for rotation of the pods