We’ve used a bit of Lego this season, nothing this advanced but this alongside the Roblox physics engine we’ve got a pretty good idea how to do deep cage climb and already making prototypes!
Last night, myself and a student made a quick Coral ground intake. For the most part it worked pretty well. Adding a rubber band to two sets of rollers gave it a bit of compliancy which seemed to help with alignment. If the Coral was misaligned too much (>45 degrees), it wouldn’t grab it unless you twisted the robot to align it better. We also experimented with adding larger wheels above the smaller ones to see if it could grab the Algae as well. The issue we had there though is that the Fuel from Steamworks has holes in it, so that they got stuck in the intake. We should have a more accurate model of the Algae arriving soon, so we’ll pause on Algae mechanisms until they arrive.
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oh hey another lego swerve creator!
I’ve made my fair share of lego swerve modules (but haven’t had the motors or turntables necessary to make a functional bot) but I really haven’t seen too many other swerve modules out there
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The smaller version of the Algae came in the mail, it’s perfect! Bought from Amazon.
For scale:
I have not searched for one yet, but I suspect I would just use really small constant force springs. They can get to be pretty tiny! For example.
Here are some pictures that should show the workings. It’s a crab setup rather than a full swerve, as controlling 8 motors is difficult. I’m using the Buwizz 2.0 system.
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Same. I’ve seen crab drive a few times to help with the lack of motors on the ev3 or nxt. One motor handles turning all steering modules at once. One for propulsion as well for all wheels, leaving one or two motor ports open for other stuff.
I remember a version Dan Kimura made for summer camps at The Robot Garage. Part of the ‘Turtle Bots’ in the Minecraft camp, like the Lua turtle bots mod if you’re familiar. We used a medium motor for steering and a large for propulsion. Turntables were a must like the one uses here.
I like this setup more, but haven’t played with anything beyond EV3 and only have NXT in my personal inventory. The passthrough motor is cool!
Edit: maybe I should try this with 3 nxts to get 9 motor ports…
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I will say, the newer powered up (called spike prime in the education system) is pretty slick, especially with pybricks (3rd party software that makes coding a lot nicer)
all the motors have a built in absolute encoder and with pybricks you can get multiple bricks communicating with each other and a bluetooth controller to control it all (though it has somewhat limited button selection)
all of the ports on the bricks can do any sensor or motor too.
not sure how much of that you have on NXT since I’ve done almost nothing with them.
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I made a swerve!!! I used my team (624) colors only, green and black, except for the bumpers. I didn’t have enough to make all 4 bumpers 
(I will order more parts soon ;). I used the spike prime system from one of my FLL bots! It’s a compact little thing!
I tried very hard to make the center of gravity perfectly centered in the robot.
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I LOVE this idea so much LEGO 4EVER!!!
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Bringing my technic pile (made from 9 defunct NXT education kits) in today to leave with the team long term. I pulled the motors, NXT bricks and sensors since I’m mostly interested in the students prototyping the mechanical structures with hand powered ‘motors’. Gives them plenty of lift arms, gears, wheels, pins and axles to make models of most FRC mechanisms.
I’ll report back the results if any. We don’t have scale game pieces yet so may not see much today. I’m printing those starting this week after we get an initial chassis scale figured out.
Edit: First off, Design team was thrilled to have Lego to brainstorm with. We came up with some good mechanism concepts and having the Lego in hand let me demonstrate a mechanical principle that is too hard to explain without seeing it. I highly recommend trying this out with your own team
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