WildStang: Swerving up something new

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Bryce2471

I just thought I should chime in here to say that team 2471 built a swerve with both the upper and lower mechanisms constructed in aluminum box tubing, and we loved it. Even with zero CNC machining, it was very easy to build, lightweight, and crazy strong.
The prototype module.

That doesn't mean this the right way to build a swerve for everyone, just that it worked well for us. We had freshman and sophomores make the boxes on a manual Bridgeport early in the season when there was nothing else for it to be used on.

The final iteration weighed just under 7 lbs, and we had zero mechanical failures from the system.

There we go. We're at that end of the spectrum - up till now we haven't had a decent brake, and we just got an in-house manual mill last year. So box-stock was always the way I pictured a swerve for us, and it seems that just being able to through-drill holes takes a lot of potential alignment and tolerance issues out of the equation. In fact, a number of times in the past we've actually welded our chassis and drilled the axle holes after the fact for the same reasons - to eliminate the tolerancing issues that we have with poor tools and students who are just learning =).

[Chris Endres]

Another reason why we decided to go for a sheet metal wheel cage is because we wanted a versatile part. By making it sheet metal, we were able to have both a 3 inch and a 4 inch configuration, so we had the ability to manufacture both easily.

The prototype we built up has the 4 inch configuration, it was supposed to be the 3 inch, but some drawings got mixed up and the 4 inch configuration was sent to our sponsor instead. This resulted brought up a few problems with the design, but nothing a dremel couldn't fix.

[SteveGarward]

To follow up, our prototype code is now posted up on Github here. This is built on top of our new framework, so you would need the core_framework repository as well to be able to run it.