Should finish up wiring tomorrow, and be driving on Saturday!
22 Likes
Got enough grease in there, Jon?
18 Likes
We let Elizabeth oversee all greasing operations. She’s been a grease monkey since she was a student on the team over a decade ago 
3 Likes
I was under the impression that the Kraken wasn’t quite compatible with the Max Swerve, at least without a lot of work ( see Announcing Kraken X60 powered by Talon FX! - #407 by SndMndBdy ), but In short:
-The motor needs to be spaced up a bit to account for the taller boss
-The pinion gear needs to be modified to be shorter
-A tiny spacer needs to be constructed to hold the gear at the right height, or the encoder bridge needs to be modified
-The “bump” in the shell of the motor slightly intersects into part of the top plate of the swerve, no matter what the orientation, so the top plate would need to be modified a little bit.
At some point I think Rev said they were going to sell a kit to alleviate all of this, but I hadn’t heard anything since then. Did you guys make all of the modifications described above? Or were they unnecessary? Or is there a kit that I didn’t hear about?
1 Like
We spent 3 hours on Monday making modifications :). By far the hardest part was modifying the gears.
11 Likes
I’ve listed them here:
We made gears to mount Krakens onto our Maxswerve Modules. Was fairly easy to do on our CNC mill and we were able to integrated the spacer into the gear just like the factory REV gear for your NEOs. If any teams are interested in doing the same we’re talking about offering this as a service. If you are a team interested in having gears modified so you can use Krakens with your REV Swerve modules leave a comment here, we’re trying to get a feel for how many might be interested to gauge the cost.
1 Like
@Jon_Stratis Would you mind elaborating on what you did for a spacer on the kraken shaft to keep the gear in place? What were the dimensions and material of the spacer? Did you have to drill out the inner bore of the throughbore encoder hex adapter to allow for a thicker spacer?
Also how did you combat the fact that the kraken slightly interferes with the other parts of the swerve module at every possible orientation? Did you just file off a small segment of the mounting plate where it interferes?
The spacer you’re talking about is the raised boss on the original MaxSwerve gear. We had some aluminum tubing that was just about the perfect inner/outer diameter. I don’t recall the dimensions, it was something we measured off and cut as we were doing it - the whole goal was that, when put against the pinion gear, it matched the overall dimensions - you can see that in the picture comparing the produced gears with the original gear above. We made no changes to the throughbore encoder or adapter, as we got the final product (gear+spacer) close enough to the original gear to work.
It doesn’t interfere. The MaxSwerve top plate has 4 sets of mounting holes, set up in pairs - you can see two of them in the image below. Normally, the instructions / default CAD from Rev has you mount the encoder as shown below, and doing so means there is interference with the Kraken. But if you shift it over to the other hole in the pair, then that interference disappears! This works the same for both encoder orientations, so you can have the encoder cable come out the right or the left - you just have to use the hole that works.
Ah okay, I guess the kraken can possibly mount without interference on the swerve plate.
I can see that you machined a spacer which acts as the boss in the gear which spaces it from the bottom 8mm bearing. My question is more how you spaced the gear from the kraken boss to the gear instead of how you spaced the gear from the 8mm bearing at the bottom of the shaft (depicted in attached image).
Did you just make a very thin aluminum spacer like I have in the CAD? I am trying to confirm if the thin spacer is what you did to keep the gear in place on the kraken shaft.
Thank you for the help by the way, my team just got some krakens and I am trying to figure out how to get them on the Maxswerve modules as Rev probably won’t release an adapter for them.
Maybe we should have put something there to hold the gear in place, but we didn’t - and we haven’t had any issues without it. We’ve had probably 50 hours of practice time and two regionals on them without any issues with the gears - we did pull one of the modules apart last weekend due to a separate issue (we thought we needed to replace the encoder, but it turned out the cable just came unplugged, but we couldn’t see it due to robot design), and everything in there looked great still!
Okay, I will probably still try to get a spacer in there somehow just for best practice and to potentially avoid the gear backing out into the encoder adapter. It is good to hear that we will probably be fine without that spacer though.
I appreciate the help.
Is there a reason why you went for this instead of just using NEO Vortex motors instead?
4 Likes
Availability of parts. When we were building, we had Krakens in-hand and could quickly get the pinion gears we needed, but we didn’t have the MAXSwerve Vortex shafts, and they were still several weeks out. In fact, but the time those shafts were available, we had a completed robot that was going through programming debugging. It was worth a little extra effort to get these motors to work just to keep on our schedule.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.