Unless your teammate plan on meeting daily for several hours a day, it’s unlikely given your team size and your ftc commitments.
No.
REV starter isn’t swerve. And while there are swerve code repositories, you still have to get them working with your robot.
If you weren’t so small of a team AND competing in FTC AND competing in a Week 1 FRC event, I might actually say that doing both Kitbot and REV Starter is doable. Given those three together? Pick one, build that.
That said, I would consider doing swerve for offseason FRC events.
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REV does have a swerve starter though. GitHub - REVrobotics/MAXSwerve-Java-Template / GitHub - REVrobotics/MAXSwerve-Cpp-Template
That is just the just the template drive, however, not a full robot. If you following some type of 80/20 rule you’d want to spend 80% of your time building and programming mechanisms and autos compared to building a drivetrain. If you are building two robots, you would not just add the time to build and program the drive. If you are just building duplicate scoring mechanisms, that is a constraint that it has to work well for both drives. If you aren’t building scoring mechanisms, its not worth doing during build season.
If a student is reasonably committed we might get 100 productive build & practice hours. So for 5 that is 500 hours. Quick building we probably can finish with that many people in 5 hours with the kit bot. The REV swerve was built/programmed during a saturday/sunday (so maybe 10 hour, generously with 5 people). So 25 and 50 hours. And applying 80/20, you’d have 125 hours building the kit plus simple mechanism and programming for auto/etc, and for the swerve bot 250 hours. At 375 total hours for both, that leaves with 125 hour, our 25 hours each (around 1.5 weeks) to practice. That is if things go well generally. If it takes 3-4 meetings to finish driving, suddenly you are out of time.
We did build a second robot (kitbot) last year and it did divide time when both were getting worked on. Preferably you’d finish one robot and then move on to the second finishing the competition robot before moving to the next one (which doesn’t have a hard deadline).
The difference between code and hardware. Code is “free” and “instant”. Hardware requires blood, sweat, and tears.
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This is your first challenge as a team (and is one that many teams face), but it is also a tremendous opportunity that can pay big dividends for you as you get into the season: how to communicate effectively and set realistic goals based upon the resources, time availability, and knowledge of the team. As a rookie team, your learning curve is going to be huge this season - especially with so few team members to help share the load.
I would highly recommend holding a focused meeting to walk through a timeline of your upcoming season in an effort to gain a better understanding of the true timeframe that your team will have available from kickoff until you need to pack up and leave for your first competition. Then list out all of the tasks that need to be completed in that timeframe and assign realistic timeframes for those tasks (which may be tough since yours is a rookie team - feel free to ask for help here). Now lay those tasks out across your timeline. It should become clear very quickly that you’ll need to simplify in order to have a hope of being ready by your first competition.
I hope you can get this worked out, as I fear that you’re setting yourself up for a lot of stress and burnout otherwise. Definitely not the FRC experience that you should be getting. Best of luck!
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