This is are first year with swerve x drive and we got the parts for building them and currently in the process of getting them ready. Expect we only got the swerve drive I know we need a pigeon 2.0 but what else will we need to get these up and running before the season.
Thank you for all the help
The Pigeon is an inertial measurement unit, it tells you which way the frame of the robot is facing
Each swerve module needs its own absolute encoder. This way each module knows which way it is facing (and these values don’t get forgotten when the robot is turned off. Things like a CANCoder from CTRE work for this.
Each brushless motor controller contains a relative encoder so you don’t need anything else for that (provided you’re using brushless motors which you probably are)
You’ll need all of the other hardware needed to make a robot (main breaker, roborio, PDP / PDH, radio, a way to power that radio, a way to get power to all of those CANCoders and the Pidgeon
To add to this, if you choose to do a all CTRE swerve (Kraken / Falcon + CANCoder + Piegon), CANivore is a CAN FD adapter that allow you to take the full advantage of CTR’s API alongside with Phoenix Pro License. With Fused CANcoder + TalonFX CPU and CAN usage on RoboRIO can be much lower, giving you overhead for other stuff. Also CTR’s swerve library can be easily configured within an hour from 0 to drive.
Don’t be intimidated. If you are interested in getting a swerve drive running, you do not need to use all of the functionality of all of the tools.
Think of it like you are deciding to get in shape and you get a membership to the gym. You don’t need a heart rate monitor, and something that measures your oxygen capacity and something that tracks your calorie and protein intake. But if you are a competitive athlete, then those additional tools provide a lot of power
Like everything else in FRC, understand what your goals are and the resources you have available to achieve them if you are new to this than some of those additional tools might bring complexity in the short term without a huge benefit, especially if you’re trying to get something built in the fall as an exercise so that you can implement a swerve drive if needed this January
There are a number of software libraries already available that can take you step-by-step through what you need to get a basic swerve drive up and running. The optimization after that to go from a basic swerve drive to something more powerful is up to you.
We have started making a guide to answer this question on our website.
It’s not fully complete but it should help.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned: more feet of wire, number of connectors (lever nuts, power poles, or solder supplies if you go that route), and zipties than you think you need.
This may already be on hand, but it can be surprising how much is needed for a large chassis.
All hail the oscilloscope!
(I know your point was about all the cool things swerve can do, but still… Very useful gizmo (less useful than it used to be now that we have all sorts of stuff for monitoring built in))
Question about can coders how do you guys protect yours from damage when ever at competitions I always here people saying they break these often but we don’t have the funds to have these things breaking often so any suggestions or strategies you use to protect them
I don’t think we have had a single one break, outside of bad soldering which is fixable.
We either have 3D printed covers on our MK4i, or use the aluminum guards that come with the modules.
Maybe it was how they had them sit but a team broke about 6 through one competition
A similar post I made actually answers a lot of questions I had: