We were able to get a swerve practice bot going this fall, and are hopeful this year’s game will be swerve friendly.
Thanks to Swerve Drive Specialties for producing a great module. The team was able to assemble same with very little difficulty thanks to your assembly video. We elected to add spacers between the module plate and the NEO’s rather than cutting the motor shaft for the clearances. The team did not want to take a chance the new rules would prohibit the uses of a motor that had the motor shaft modified.
We were able to code the bot using 4048 sample code they had shared on CD. Since we are using the MK2 and the absolute encoders, we had to modify their initialization procedure which used incremental encoders to record wheel position.
Our first driving test video is linked. It is a little long and unedited as the student that takes care of our media is busy helping the FLL kids.
Bowling Center and Restaurant. I have a back store room that the kids have remodeled into a shop. Our main assembly table (with storage underneath for flat material) doubles as a ping pong table.
I assume you were driving in the field orient (arcade) mode? It is hard to tell from the video because the robot does a lot of translating without rotating and a lot of rotating without translating, but not a lot of rotation while translating that is the clear giveaway for whether you are in field orient versus robot orient. If you are not using field orient, you should. It makes driving swerve much more intuitive. There are times where robot orient makes sense and some drivers prefer robot orient. But you want to have the capability to do both and let the drivers pick which mode makes the most sense to them.
So cult of serve a subset of being in the FRC cult?
The video was actually using robot oriented. We have now hooked up a gyro and we like the field oriented drive a lot better. We set up a button so driver can switch back and forth. Waiting for either First Choice or our Andymark voucher to become available to can upgrade to gyro that doesn’t drift as much.
This weekend’s project is to get the Limelight hooked up so the robot will self-orient via rotation onto a target.
