Swerve drive help

Looking for some advice from teams who use swerve drive. Our team is planning to begin working with swerve drive over the off season in hopes to develop it for possible use next season. We are just beginning our research and have never used it on our team before. Our concern comes with the number of motors and encoders just in the swerve drivetrain. So my question is what is the most effective way to wire the drive train in order to maintain an effective number of available ports for other motors being used in other mechanisms.

What we did is have a SparkMax speed controller for each Swerve motor and loop them all in a CAN Network. This way we could just add more controllers to the loop for other mechanisms and the only ports we had to worry about was the CAN terminal on the PDP and the Rio. This also included the CANCoders on each module .

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I understand the CAN loop but what about all the 40A power ports you’d have to use

We have the new REV PDH board that I believe has 16 channels, so 8 are reserved for the swerve, and 8 are open for other functions, such as our shooter, intake, and index.

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It is true it is a bit excessive but it works

Lots of good info here - Swerve for few but not for you

You don’t need 40A for steering, so just the 4 drive motors need to be wired into 40A breakers. The 4 steering motors can be wired into lower amperage breakers.

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The “old” CTRE PDP has 16 channels, 8x 40A and 8x 30A (though you can now use the 30A channels with the new 40A REV breakers). The new REV PDH has 20 channels, all of which can be up to 40A.

Plenty of teams have done swerve with the PDP using only 8 motors for manipulators. If you can get the PDH and now have 12 motors to use, it shouldn’t be a problem at all.

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I strongly recommend a CTRE Canivore. Run your drivetrain CAN and your gyro on the Canivore bus. This does ‘currently’ lock you into CTRE devices (pigeon, falcon, cancoders) the reason for this is that your swerve drive and control will require a lot of can updating and may saturate your network. The Canivore allows you to run 2 separate busses. We saw a huge difference in can stability and dropped messages between the Heartland regional when we didn’t have a canivore and the Central Missouri where we did.

Yes a Rev PDH will help tremendously too.

Your steering doesn’t need 40 amps, we currently have a 25amp software limit on our steering motors and have no issue. But with the PDH you do get more power ports total and using 8 for motors and 1 for your encoders and gyro will take away a lot of options so it is good to have the additional ports.

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