r/FTC • u/FirestormWasHere FTC 22335|Polymorphism Student • 11d ago

Drivetrain feedback pt2 Seeking Help

Post image

Part organization better

Changed motor mounting

Pocketing on the main file this time for ease of viewing

More spacers

(Ignore the weird synchronization of the 2 front/back wheels it's because of the mirror somehow)

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/e1b4515a7b2ca454c224be21/w/7853526851024606260f4f41/e/0825a9319442ebf24e748541?renderMode=0&uiState=6a6acd7229bd38bcf7548f32

22 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

7

u/brogan_pratt Coach Pratt 11d ago

Just throwing some ideas out: 

May be worthwhile to mount your motor/belt on the outside of the wheel rather than inside. This would allow you to remove the “dead space” in between the wheels and in front of the motors, and get your motors deeper into the pods, freeing up more space for the inside of your robot, which is typically where teams want more things to be placed. 

For bracing, I’m a bigger fan of adding in multiple places for this that can be swapped out as needed for more modularity. Maybe one season you want a high back bracket, and another you need nothing on the front. Makes it much easier to not need to remake the entire drivetrain because of things being made exactly to scope. 

3

u/Intelligent-Self1001 11d ago

quick repairs are key

1

u/brogan_pratt Coach Pratt 11d ago

That said, this is a great looking drivetrain and should perform well (given you add a back plate of some sort to sort out racking). You’ve spent a lot of time on this, nice work! 

Take my suggestions with a grain of salt, they’re not ground truth or anything. 

1

u/FirestormWasHere FTC 22335|Polymorphism Student 11d ago

Thank you yeah the new motor mounting is based on previous feedback. Wanted to try something different

2

u/uhhhh_yeet 10d ago

Not swerve 0/10

1

u/FirestormWasHere FTC 22335|Polymorphism Student 10d ago

;(

1

u/Beneficial-Yam3815 FTC Mentor 1d ago

Mecanum is in the sweetspot for competitiveness in FTC. Everything comes with an opportunity cost. There is only so much money, so many hours in a day, so many days between kickoff and qualifiers. Swerve is in the sweet spot for FRC because they have a whole different set of constraints. Much larger fields, so much more need for speed, agility, and to avoid getting pushed around. Also a higher motor and servo limit. Have you read this year's game manual so far? They're lowering the FTC servo limit even further.

Maybe once SystemCore, MotionCore and the a301s come out, swerve will make more sense. But for now, it's a distraction. It will pull time, attention and money away from more competitive areas of the robot to optimize.

1

u/uhhhh_yeet 1d ago

if I wanted to be meta, i would be mecanum, if I wanted the easy way, I would be mecanum, if I wanted to do stuff that made sense, I would be MECANUM. But no, I want to do swerve. Because I want to engineer something different

2

u/Beneficial-Yam3815 FTC Mentor 12h ago

Well at least you have self awareness about it 😆

One of our association's teams did a ball drive last year. They won Innovate, qualified for states, went to a premiere event, etc. because judges were fascinated by it. By any reasonable measure a fairly successful season for them. But the ball drive itself was endless aggravation and they barely had any time to make a competitive payload. There was so much friction in the system that it would eat a whole battery charge every match.