233 is proud to present our Onshape configurable swerve drive base CAD: 233_Drive_Base - Final - Released Version - 2024 | Main Drivebase ASM
Over the offseason, 3 students and I created a configurable swerve base for all Swerve Drive Specialties (SDS) pods. This allows you to configure nearly every aspect of a drive base, cutting the time to CAD a drive base to ~1.25 hours (due to processing delays).
A word of caution, this configurable CAD model is complex and takes 30+ sec to process 1 change. We plan to make a video tutorial at some point, unfortunately, we have run out of time to make that video before the season starts.
I will try to answer any questions anyone has about this model on December 28th only until after season, as our team and I will be away for the holidays and busy prepping for Kickoff and processing Artemis.
We have plans for future revisions to improve processing time, simplify the configuration process, and improve features and options. That will have to wait until next season though.
Sincerely.
Tristan Shepard
8 Likes
Very excited to see the PINK Swerve!
2 Likes
Hi! While this drivebase could be useful for cadding in season, I think that it might be more optimal to make a drivetrain based off of your master sketch. Starting out with a preconfigured drivetrain can limit your thinking at the start of the season. For example, it’s very easy to skip over the idea of an under the bumper intake if your drivetrain is already made. Additionally, cadding a drivetrain can be completed relatively fast and is not the biggest time sink of the design of your bot.
I think that this drivetrain could be useful for your team and others, but I would recommend teams design their own drivetrain at the start of the season to ensure that it is parametric and fits their needs exactly
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Thank you for your comment.
While you bring up some valid points, I don’t believe I added enough detail or context to fully explain how we will/may use this. This is meant to be a tool to use if it is viable to the chosen game and strategy. Additionally, this CAD model is not supposed to be the final product, but do the heavy lifting in a very short amount of time so you can come back and make the unique changes for the chosen design and strategy.
This year, I would estimate that our team has around 50-60% new students that have not done FRC before as our graduating class was large last year. Additionally, our team focuses on more than just the robot, so some of our student base isn’t as focused with the robot as other students but on other areas that they are passionate about. This is a short-term limit on our CADing capacity despite the off-season trainings so nothing is relatively quick for us to CAD this year. As our students get more experience and practice this obstacle will go away, but for now anything that can lessen the burden will be helpful as the mentors and I on our team make it a priority for the students to do all the work. The mentors offer them guidance and recommendations and teach them if they choose to listen to it.
We will be following a very thorough engineering design process and prototyping to design and solve the robot for the competition.
This post is meant to be the CAD release per the rules, so if it is something we want to use in build season we can, since this was developed in the off-season.
I do understand what you are saying and appreciate the advice as it is in my opinion correct.
Sincerely.
Tristan Shepard
5 Likes