REV Robotics 2024 / 2025

FIRST General Forum
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It’s hard to believe, but REV Robotics is officially celebrating our 10-year anniversary! As we reflect on the past decade, we’re filled with immense gratitude for the entire FIRST community, teams, mentors, volunteers, and supporters who have been with us throughout this journey.

When David and I started the company, our mission was simple: to make robotics more accessible and to help empower teams with the tools they need to succeed. Thanks to your incredible support, feedback, and belief in us, we’ve been able to push the boundaries of what’s possible and grow alongside the community we care so deeply about.

Over the last 10 years, we’ve worked to improve our products, learn from our mistakes, and continually innovate to better serve all of you. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved, but we know that none of it would have been possible without the collaboration and passion that drives this amazing community.

As we look forward to the next decade, we’re excited to continue this journey with you all. We have big plans for the future—new products, new ideas, and new ways to make robotics even more accessible and fun for students and mentors alike.

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Here are some fun stats

  • REV has shipped out over 160,000 Orders
  • REV has shipped products to 198 Countries & Territories
  • REV has 46 full time employees with a few more new ones yet to start
  • REV has over 50+ feather/fur-babies (12 are frequent guests in our offices)
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  • REV’s headquarters in Carrollton, TX is ~55,000 sq-ft
  • REV has warehouses in 4 Countries (with more to come)
  • REV Stocks 10 Flavors of pop-tarts in our break room.

I will be using this thread to announce new products, and answer questions about upcoming things for REV.

10th Anniversary - As part of our 10th anniversary, we are going to be doing some fun things throughout the year. Some of these we will announce and some of these might just be surprises that we put inside your orders, so stay tuned.

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Servo Hub - This new addition to REV’s hub family provides both CAN (for FRC) and RS485 (for FTC communication options for adding servos to your robot. This product is a replacement for our Servo Power Module (which will be discontinued at the end of this season). The main difference is that you can now create the servo signals directly from the device instead of just being a power injector. We expect that these will be available in middle to late October. Note: even with the release in October, some FRC related features will not be available until our 2025 version of REVib. We will make our schedule clear on this before they are available for sale.

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Team REV - Applications are only open until September 17th.
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We have a ton of additional new things that will be launching this fall and have bunch of other things we are excited to share with you for the future.

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I look forward to REVLib 2025 and its new features.

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This is by far the most important stat- what flavours though?

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Can I just buy the dino???

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Can we get a whole documentary on the REV break room in the vein of “Half-Life Snacks”?

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The fact that these are so organized, down to labels for each kind, means they are a very important staple of the office.

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  • REV’s headquarters in Carrollton, TX is ~55,000 sq-ft

Definitely the best and coolest warehouse I’ve ever been in. Really grateful for the late night order picks ups and combined scouting meetings with 2714.

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Congratulations on 10 years, Greg and company! Your anniversary coincides with my first season as a new FRC mentor. Since nearly the entire FRC team was made up of people who only had experience with FIRST Lego League (and no engineering mentors), the 1x1 extrusion and gussets were very Lego-like and so that’s what we purchased to build a robot that year (did REV even have a storefront then? Or was it just sold through another vendor the first year?)

We did manage to build the world’s worst Recycle Rush robot by using that extrusion in completely inappropriate ways. Much has been learned since then, and all those kids have gone on to do some pretty cool things with their lives.

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No wildberry? Blasphemy.

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was about to comment asking where the s’mores were, but I can just barely see them poking out lol, you should collect the limited edition ones and create a poptart museum :rofl:

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As members of Team REV over the past two years and coming from THE CEREAL CITY (Battle Creek, Michigan), this makes me proud. I will see what the good folks at Kellanova can do about exploring a REV flavor.

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Here’s a few feature requests for REVLib in no particular order.

  • Make SmartMotion close loop based on sensor position rather than velocity
    • Including feed forward, so the motor controller can effectively apply feed forward when executing a motion profile
  • Allow motor encoder to be reset to a user specified value automatically when a connected limit switch is activated
  • Encoder fusion and/or backlash compensation
  • Change the defaults for motor encoder measurement period and average depth, so velocity PID is more accurate out of the box
  • Better simulation support
    • Currently only Spark Maxes are supported by REVPhysicsSim, and it only updates the velocity value. Updating more values (position, bus voltage), and executing some logic (like limit switch logic) would be awesome.

Some hardware/firmware requests for REV:

  • Introduce field oriented control to increase torque output and motor efficiency
  • A breakout board rather than a cable for external sensor connections to the Spark Flex
    • Possibly a board with a short cable if needed for packaging reasons
  • High speed CAN bus device
  • Higher resolution absolute encoder
    • The existing REV through bore encoder is only 10 bit, which is only accurate down to ~0.36 degrees
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Those software features would be such a game changer for REV teams.

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My #1 Revlib request is for better simulation support. The current simulation method is difficult to use and almost unusable for multiple motors (i.e. swerve). Please address this issue and include simulation examples in your library.

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I’ve found using wpilibs simulation hardware to be the best option, but then you need to do some kind of hardware abstraction if you want your code to pull data from the same place in sim and real

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Do you have any examples?

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it’s kotlin code but yeah check it out if you want

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Shameless plug, we’ve had to develop many of these missing features on our own in our team library, PurpleLib, including:

  • Simulation
  • Motion profiled position control
  • Motor encoder reset upon limit switch activation
  • Encoder fusion
  • Motor encoder velocity parameters
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Theoretically, REV could make it 16 bit with the current chip they have inside the through bore
https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/pub-005892

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