I built our team a crazy wheel that fits the SDS MK4 modules. The idea is that when you fail -something- on your swerve module and need it working in a big hurry, you pull off the wheel and substitute this thing!
Its a 4" Omni wheel with bearings in it, so it rolls any way you want, irrespective of what the swerve module is doing (steer OR drive)!
I recently made some updates so that it uses the stock SDS bearings… Bore or drill out the hole in the AM-2948A Omni-wheel to anything over 1/2". I would use 3/4". Two 3DP parts needed and six 3/4" #10-32 BHCS. I suggest super gluing the shaft sleeve into it so it doesn’t get separated. Maybe glue the bearings in place too.
its still summer CD for another 258 hours! Seeing a bunch of 3D printed TPU wheels has got me wondering if printing your own omni rollers with ridges in it might be worthwhile though…
dang, this could’ve been useful to us last year when i had to drive on 3 modules after the shaft on the fourth module was damaged with only two matches left.
I think this is a smart move, assuming that the time necessary to install a pre-prepared wheel is less than the time it would take to remove and replace a motor/controller/wheel/gear/module, whichever is determined to be the source of the problem. Probably a great fix when you’ve got only a few minutes to get ready to play.
After our last competition where we suffered swerve issues throughout elims, I came to the same conclusion as you guys. The Omni wheels we had lying around our shop were slightly different to yours, so I didn’t have to 3d print anything, just a couple bearings and were all we needed to get our wheel working. Driving definitely felt different than with 4 wheels but much more manageable than the completely disabled wheel we had in those finals matches.
We’ve done this with a standard Andymark 4" omni wheel with bearings installed for the last couple of years. The thing has mostly stayed in our parts box, but we did use it briefly when we had a swerve motor die and didn’t have time to replace it immediately. It does actually work.
Haha classic, this might be too much to ask for, but I’d love to see videos of different self induced situations, like wheel spins fwd/rev properly but doesn’t turn, wheel doesn’t go fwd/rev but the rotation is correct, no movement on either at all, totally random movement on both etc.
We used a similar solution at FiT champs last year. We were running WCP Swerve X and used a old Vex 4" omni. with bearings and a few spacers no custom pieces.
Here is the match we used it in. We had a magnet come loose in one of our swerve motors and lock it up, but we did not have time to diagnose before our match so we threw on our emergency omni. The only thing we did is just try to avoid the charge station other than that no changes to the code. The drivers said they could tell it wasn’t quite right, but said it was easy to adapt to and scored a good amount of game pieces. We might have been one or so off our normal pace, but much better than not driving.
We are the middle robot in blue 2582.
I highly recommend something like this in your toolbox if you run swerve.
We had issues with our swerve motors (mostly because I accidentally inverted the drive motor), so we definitely thought about running one of the modules with a steering motor only, so it basically acted as a powered castor wheel. I don’t remember if we ended up running it during a match, but it would be better than an Omni bc it wouldn’t increase how easily you can get pushed around.
Nonetheless this looks cool and we are probably going to make one in case something goes wrong and we don’t have time to fix it.
