Rest assured, we’re not waiting until 3 weeks before load-in to start assembling!
Our alpha drivetrain helped us practice with assembling and wiring the design, so once our anodized parts arrived, the competition drivetrain went together relatively quickly.
Wiring
Our custom swerve covers help manage some of the wires and keep them out of the gears.
For our future drivetrains, we’re planning to use ReFire adapter boards and custom-cut Molex CAN wires to avoid the large bundles of CAN wires. Unfortunately, the official Power Pole Adapter Boards don’t work with the MK4i because they direct the CAN wires downward, making them the most exposed part of the drivetrain.
Software
Software-wise, we designed our code with two different Robot classes using the same drivetrain subsystem to support both alpha and competition drivetrains. We also expanded the Phoenix swerve template with some code for finding the correct module offsets. This decision allowed us to get the drivetrain running almost immediately after we set all the CAN IDs.
With this drivetrain, we started tuning the module control with TorqueCurrentFOC control on the drive motors. This torque-based approach is easier to tune and puts the motor into a lower-speed, higher-torque performance curve.
We’ve also tested our auto paths, running at full speed and seeing how high we can make the acceleration. Currently the drivetrain uses SDS L3 gearing with the 16t pinion, but we are investigating the best gear ratio to use, based on our auto paths.