pic: Team 221 LLC. - Wild Swerve Module

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Jared341

Competition is not a bad thing. For anyone.

I agree, competition makes products BETTER and usually winds up making the companies involved gather a larger collective market share than they could individually without competition.

For the somewhat moral issue of having a swerve module that we can just purchase rather than build, I can go either way on this one. First pass at the design looks great though! Once it hits production and is for sale, will you post the CAD files somewhere?

(Pro) We really should be able to push the limits of the cRIO given better mechanical systems relative to what a team can build with a less than perfect shop. Any robotics group these days is all about 'autonomous this' and 'software that'. The group I meet with in Fairfax once a month is all about line following, maze solving, and swerving around cones ... forget anything that's technically complicated to build. Even the robots that win awards at FRC competitions these days seem to do alot with automation, regardless of what the award is for. With a COTS swerve module, I expect that in the longer term we'll have more capability to attract software and systems engineering mentors to teams who may otherwise not have them due to limited mechanical capabilities.

(Con) In some ways it feels like something's missing when one doesn't understand the sweat and toil that goes into designing something if it's just given as a present for Christmas. Then, 3 days later when it's broken one may wonder how he/she is going to go get another one rather than fixing what is already in front of them...after all, it wasn't designed in house, none of the design decisions are understood, and we may very well have hot glue holding on the sprockets if it's given to the programmers to fix come competition time () . This metaphor is an extremely common example of what happens in industry with COTS items, especially software. I just spent 260 hours debugging a problem that's plagued us for months in our 6million+ lines of code, and every piece of it had to do with COTS software. 260 hours, plus what others have spent on other problems with it over the last several years ... at our equivalent hourly rate, would it have been less expensive to make our own implementation of this software? It is truly hard to tell at this point, but at least I wouldn't have spent so much time stressing over it at work .