Overclocked's Rover Reveal

[Joe Johnson]

TLDR: Watch this video of the Overclocked FIRST Fall Practice Project.

Merry Christmas FIRSTers!

Not that this is a gift to anyone but either I post this today or it may not get posted at all as I am heading to my 90 year old mother's home and the internet is, well, how do you say Ye Ole' Dialup in Modern English?

BOOM DONE. and the Robot in Three Days experience last year really lit a fiter under my desire to get back on a real FIRST team for the 2015 Season. This and that, I ended up on Overclocked, team 246, as the lead technical mentor.

One of the things I brought to the team was my strong belief in doing Fall Practice Projects as a way of getting better at FIRST but also as a way of getting everyone on the team to understand the team's capabilities. I can't tell you how important it is for a team to have a realistic understanding of what it can and cannot do. Sizing your robot ambitions to match your teams abilities is really important.

For this year's project, we decided to try to advance the teams ability in the area of Chassis Design. Having been an early innovator in swerve drive with Chief Delphi, my tendency was to push the team to build a swerve drive. but, Overclocked had a much stronger CS team than mechanical or electrical and frankly, I felt it was just a bridge too far for this team.

But... ...I've known Anthony Lapp from back when we was a pup cutting this teeth on Team #1 when they were sponsored by 3D Systems*. When he's not doing cool stuff for NASA or designing clever mechanisms into Team 118's robot, he selling Swerve Drives at Team221.com.

I was bold enough to ask him and he was kind enough to offer us Wild Swerve modules. Of course, I would have rather and his sexy new Revolution Swerves, but beggars can't be choosers.

With the hollow shaft Wild Serves in our back pocket so to speak I felt we could take on the mechanism of a 4 wheel drive, 4 wheel independent swerve.

The software and electronics teams took on the rest.

Anyway, with out further delay. Here is Roever, Overclocks Fall Practice Project: Rover, a study in "unpinnable" robots. (13 minute vide of me yapping and the robot being great).

Features

• 4 wheel independent swerve. 6 inch wheels, 1 CIM per wheel, 10:1 ratio
• Steering with 775 Banebot motors plus VersaPlantary. 54:1 from motor to swerve.
• Nav6 "IMU" (really a high tech electronic "South Pointing Chariot") plus a ton of software provides driving in Real World Coordinates (as opposed to robot coords).

We will post the code and CAD online soon. Stay tuned.

Can't wait for the new season to start, glad to be back in the saddle.

Tick tock, Overclocled!

Dr. Joe

*Fun fact, that 3 in their name made them team #1 by the way -- in 1997 when FIRST assigned the permanent numbers for the first time, they sorted by Sponsor Name and in ASCII, 3 is before A. True Story...