It’s late but we built a robot to compete in the 2017 season. Sorry we’re new at this - didn’t know we were supposed to build it before now.
More seriously, this is our pre-rookie (?) robot to prepare the team for our first season in the competition!
Looks awesome! How much does it weigh? and is 323 a fork of 16? Seems like a lot of the knowledge has carried through with the 775pro swerve.
Thanks for the reply!
I think it weighs around 38 lbs (not including bumpers or battery) - but do take that with a grain of salt. I haven’t actually been in the same room as the robot yet. This post will be corrected with a different number if necessary.
323 is comprised of mentors and a few students who were formerly a part of 16, so that might explain some of the swerve resemblance.
EDIT: Evidently a block of steel was added, putting the weight at around 45 lbs minus bumpers and battery.
Ankle biter (the robot) weighes 70 lbs driving around the field. This is with a 5lb block of steel for balance climbing.
What an amazing bot. We’re looking forward to seeing what y’all produce up close and personal at Rock City in march.
Tell me about the slip rings and running CAN through them. Any metrics around it? Has any noise analysis been done?
Holy cow that thing is fast!
The only thing I think there is to critique is the small acquisition zone on your gear mechanism, but of course that is part of the design. Awesome overall, and I love the lightning climb.
Good luck in 2018!
Tell me about the slip rings and running CAN through them.
I’ve been wondering about that myself Marshall. 
What speed is that robot geared for? It looks obscenely fast!
I can’t remember the theoretical speed but actual is 17 feet a second.
Sorry, probably no white paper soon but 1mb data busses based on RS485 are pretty noise tolerant. I spent quite a bit of time building and maintaining 12mb networks and at that rate the bit width is a lot closer to the reflections and noise spikes.
The first testing was done with about 6" stubs through worn slip rings to single Speed controllers. That didn’t yield any noticeable data loss. I’m not worried about missing a single update. The whole purpose for doing this is to be able to run the SRX in closed loop mode so only the setpoint is being updated through CAN.
This prototype is more like 8" stubs to two SRXs. They are running open loop with no sign of twitches or delays in response. I’m sure there are some failures.The bus is no doubt more fragile with long stubs and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for all possible configurations but I’m comfortable with the concept.
This would have been impossible in the CRio/CANJaguar days but Omar and Joe and I’m sure others have created a really fault tolerant CAN system for us to play with now.
Awesome to see such a great little off-season robot 
Looking forward to seeing what 323 produces this build season!
I was fortunate enough to see this bot in action at the GRC, and it was epic. Well done guys.
Wow. It’s amazing that such a tiny bot can be so good at the two most important components of the game.
Congrats on a successful offseason build and good luck in 2018. I’m looking forward to seeing what FRC 323 comes up with to tackle Power Up.
Cool. Good info. Call me skeptical but very intrigued. Slip rings have been purchased for some testing.
Looked like the driver was using dual joysticks and an operator with the game pad. Is that right?
Also, nice job on it, impressive even for a veteran rookie team. I saw it at Kansas Cup, thought not in action. It really moves well.
Look forward to seeing your 2018 robot at Wisconsin. FYI our student were really excited about the prospects of touring Harley’s engine factory, so we will probably be in Milwaukee a day early to do that.
For the driver we use a 2 joystick setup with the Logitech Extreme 3D and Attack 3 joysticks, and for the operator we use a Logitech Game-pad.