This may be a dumb question but with ctre becoming the future of First robotics, we don’t have the budget and the amount of motors to learn ctre swerve. I am asking on behalf of my team that if a team has 3 spare Falcon 500 motors that we can maybe have would be very nice. Of course this is a weird and big ask, but any help would be nice.
Thank you.
It’s worth noting that while the performance specs are different, the controls for Falcons (Vex/CTRE) and Krakens (WCP/CTRE) are identical, meaning if you already have a few Falcons you can use them together with Krakens on a Swerve Drive (for instance, using Falcons for Steering and Krakens for Drive, or vice-versa).
I’ve seen a number of teams with configurations like this due to cost and availability issues with the new motors, and it seemed to work fine for them. This way they only had to buy 4 new motors instead of all 8.
Just a thought.
That’s the thing my teams budget doesn’t come in until the start of the ftc season of next year, and then since it goes through our school, it won’t get to us for a while not allowing my team to learn how to code it. And we already have 5 falcons, and if we were able to learn ctre until the Krakens come in. Thats the plan i had in mind since a lot of team don’t use falcons anymore but as you see it is still a big ask.
You might have better luck asking a team near you if you could borrow a few motors for the summer
Namely the world champion alliance captain 1690
Just throwing it out there, they can begin to work with it and move individual modules/ just get stuff in the right order on the programming side.
Swerve I think can be done with only 2 modules and caster wheels, or other motors can be used for the steering such as neo 550s, or a lot of motor options you might have also used in season. If you have to use other motors it might be a bit of a change to switch later on, but is doable especially if they’ve had a fair bit of swerve practice already since they could start in April rather than September.
We had luck trading NEOs for Falcons with some local teams this year after deciding to go with the CTRE software stack.
I’ll check and see what extra falcons we have and you could borrow them until you are able to acquire new motors in the fall. I may only have a couple that we currently aren’t using.
I’m currently in Texas, but will check the workshop when I get back to Oklahoma this weekend.
Out of curiosity, what swerve modules and motors did you use this past season?
We used SDS Mk4 L2 with all Neo, but everything else we ran with it was ctre, such as the gyro scope and the can coders etc, so it was giving us some coding troubles.
And we plan on going all ctre next year because they are more reliable and just better motors all around. But we don’t know when they will come in because they take forever to go through our school, but if it was possible i would like to learn and teach the rest of team on how it works before i leave because i am a junior now. Or easier said I am class of 2025. And if you are a Oklahoma team, after we are done with the falcons i can give them back when we are done. Because i would give them back once we got the krakens.
Hi! Fellow team member of OP here. Were wanting to use the Falcons for testing the CTRE Generator out. Our Neo swerve was held together with zipties and duct tape this year. 
The main thing we’re wanting to test is Pathplanning and various CTRE software perks. Thought id clear some stuff up.
CTRE has excellent simulation support. I believe you can try out most of things you are talking about, including a driveable serve sim, in that sim without hardware.
As for having actual hardware - there’s nothing stopping your from testing a single swerve module. Confirm it moves the way you expect, then change the ID’s to the next module and do the same.
In this way you can test that all your code is doing what you expect it to without having the expensive hardware - since you already have some falcons on hand.
Why specifically falcons? Rev max is always an option and I believe you can use a neo 550 as a turning motor
Good to know! Will be checking that out sometime this week.
We use Krakens for drive and Mini-CIMs for steering and it works pretty well. I also suspect that if you don’t have any mini-CIMs, someone will. I know teams are practically giving those away as they upgrade to brushless. Good luck!
TurdSwerve could be an option. It only takes 4 motors and could be enough to practice the programming.
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.