So my team is getting a 7500$ grant within the next week, I have expressed heavy interest in getting full-Kraken swerve with the pigeon 2 gyro and cancoders, as well as Pre-Order: Thrifty Swerve: 5 Modules + Frame + Tread Bundle swerve modules. My mentor has agreed to all of this, and it would be around 3850$ and doesn’t include extra motors or anything.
I guess my question would be is it worth it? that’s a lot of money, and we also have to buy the software for the motors which is 200$, our robot would be fast and we are capable of fully coding and assembling the swerve. But is it worth it? Should we order different parts?
Also, a separate question, we don’t have a PDH right now, and I figure it would be smart to practice making swerve before the season so should we also order one of those? We are getting one in the rookie kit (my team is in an awkward position where our past school took some of our stuff but not all of it), so is it worth spending that extra 200$ or should we wait until kickoff?
Definitely get the PDH now, you’re going to want swerve up and running before the regular season.
You don’t need to buy software, the basic ctre software is free. Don’t pay $200 for Phoenix Pro its not going to give you any meaningful performance increase as a rookie.
It’s only worth it to go down the swerve road if your team has sufficient funds to also purchase all the other materials and parts needed to build a complete robot. If you’ve been part of a different team, you should have some idea of that overall expense. Be sure to do the math on the full robot before making your swerve decision.
If your team has the funds, the new Thrifty kit is on the lower cost side of getting into swerve. Going with Krakens rather than NEOs adds about $650 to the total, but avoiding the space and wiring issues with SparkMAXes is valuable. The CTRE software is also a step up from the Rev software. With the Thrifty modules being new, there might be some growing pains, but I’d trust Thrifty and Ryan Dognaux to do whatever it takes to make sure customers have a good experience.
It certainly seems worthwhile to get a PDH now if your team is going to be able to meet in the fall to build, program, and drive a swerve chassis. The extra PDH sounds like it will complete a set of all the primary electronics, which is great to have around as spares. Until you have enough swerve modules to use the second set to make a practice/alpha robot, you can use the extra PDH to safely power prototypes while the main PDH is installed on the competition robot.
Whatever you do, make sure that you can have a driving swerve chassis before kickoff. It’s very challenging to get swerve working during build season. Driving is the first priority in any game, if you can’t do that, you can’t do anything else. If you don’t have it working before kickoff, build the Andymark chassis.
With that said, we ran CTRE swerve last year with Falcons and have swapped to Krakens this offseason. It’s been reliable, easy to package due to the integrated motor controllers, and relatively easy to get coded.
I agree with the above. If you’re looking for some other suggestions of good purchases, 3847 put together these lists a few years ago. It’s possibly a little dated now, but I’d look through them and make note of what items you don’t have already.
If you are a rookie team, then depending on how much experiences with FRC both your mentors and students has, jumping right in with a swerve might not be the best place to start with. There is so much more than just having a very good drive-train to have a successful robot.
Instead, probably need to look at tools (hand/power/3d-printer/larger machines), robot parts (spare/dev RIO/PDH/Radio, sensor, metal/wood/lexan, wires, 3d filament if you plan on using 3d printer, computers/monitors/graphics cards (CAD and Programming), etc.
metal tubes’ pricing has gotten really bad especially if you don’t have any local suppliers and requires shipping too.
Not knowing what resources you guys have now, I would suggested that you/your mentors to reach out to some local-nearby teams to see if they will be willing to help mentor you guys as a team. [often time even just knowing who can lean you spare parts can be differences between having a robot at comp vs waiting to get to comp to finish building your robot].
Just a reminder that Rev now offers the NEO Vortex and Spark Flex, which package very similarly to the WCP Kraken, are slightly cheaper, break in less expensive ways, have the cool modular/through-shaft feature, and are not currently on backorder.
Vortexes also had several different kinds of QA issues and software problems in 2024. While REV was fairly responsive to those issues, the motors still proved to be a poor investment for our team, so much so that we rush-ordered a full CTRE swerve setup over a weekend to run it at our third event with next to no testing, and it still performed more accurately and reliably than our 8x Vortex drivetrain.
For a swerve, through-shaft doesn’t help and is arguably counterproductive. The Krakens are also clearing their back order currently.
If you‘re already set up to build a robot (parts/tools from prior teams) and this grant is available primarily to buy a swerve, I can’t recommend enough that you prefer the CTRE control ecosystem over REV. You don’t need Phoenix Pro though, and I can’t speak to recommendations on swerve modules.
I know I’m recommending the more expensive path, but in our experience, the extra cost was worth the build time and matches that would have been saved this season.
Based on my experiences in the 2024 season, I think my general advice on swerve is to pick a horse and ride it. If you like REV, go full MAXSwerve with NEOs. If you like CTRE, do full CTRE electronics in your preferred mechanical platform (SDS, WCP, Thrifty, etc). Trying to mix and match SDS modules with NEO 1.1 and Thrifty encoders did our troubleshooting zero favors last season, to the point that we abandoned swerve and went back to an AM14U.
That said, it is clear to me that
Swerve is becoming table stakes in modern FRC so I don’t fault any team for shelling out on it.
Teams who went full CTRE had their faith rewarded in 2024, so I don’t fault any team for shelling out on that.
PDH: See if anyone around you can loan you one. Even an older PDP would get you rolling, just with fewer slots for other things. But also, a second PDH is good to have in case your kit of parts one experiences issues. Or if you just want to have two robots driving around.
If before kickoff you’re just planning on building swerve a PDP will suffice but if you want to build your swerve something else then I would recommend a PDH because of the fact that all of the slots for breakers are the same size so you have more options for the amperage of the breakers that you put in. (This is the issue my team ran into last year because we needed more 40amp breakers than the slots in a PDP)
Before recommending Vortex/Flex for use on swerve modules (especially to a newer, first-time swerve team), I’d like to see a more clear resolution to the issues reported in
The Thrifty modules look similar enough to the MK4i modules where problems occurred that I’d be cautious. It seems like Rev is responding, but I’m not sure they’ve found a way to address the problem.
Thrifty swerve has bearings that support the motor shafts, and a spacer that has a larger surface area. IIRC just having bearings supporting motor shafts fixed the issue.