Best practices for 4 motor drivetrains in tank drive

[Conor Ryan]

So we have a 4 motor drive train controlled by 4 PWM's, it's a tank drive.

Would it more sense to use the 2 motor.vi with a Y cable and 2 PWM's, or have 4 PWM's controlled individually?


My thoughts:
I'm thinking to lighten the load on the processor it would make most sense to go with the 2 Drive + Y Cables. We aren't doing any high end vision processing for now, and sensor usage is fairly minimal.

But... for reliability's sake at least you can drive on 1 motor if a PWM cable pops out.

But... wouldn't a 4 PWM set up be theoretically more difficult to setup in autonomous?

I think it's a toss up, I think I just convinced myself to go with a 4 PWM set up (no Y Cable).

[tilky]

As far as the processor is concerned, the difference is minimal, it even exists at all. Surely with the current code it would not make a difference. My suggestion would be to stick with the 4 pwms. If I remember correctly our team had a pwm come out at a competition. But since we had another one on that side, we could still drive. Granted it was slower and we had to adjust steering, but at least we didn't just sit on the field.
I would say only to go with the y-pwm if you ran out of pwm for other motors (highly unlikely)

[Invictus3593]

It doesn't seem like the y-splitter would make too much of a difference, and, like tilky said, it would have little effect on the processor. But little effect is still some effect. I say it's worth a try!