You might have thought you read that Swerve V3 was supposed to be my final one, but as usual I couldn’t help building another. This time, the focus was on helping bring up the floor of the Rival competition, aka building a cheaper and more accessible swerve. It uses only 3d printed parts (mostly PLA+ from my trusty stock Ender 3), and parts from Fabworks. It uses the wheels from the Rev Max Swerve modules because wheels are consumables that should be easy to swap.

The core electricals are boards I already had but I have a more integrated “Robot Board” designed which includes power switch, precharge, control board, IMU, receiver, individually addressable LED driving, GPIOs, etc all integrated for various power source inputs.

Starting with motors and controllers, I sized the motors to achieve a more reasonable top speed and maintain the punchy acceleration for Rival sized robots specifically. The resulting motor is $15 instead of $50-$130 (saving gets multiplied by 8 so that’s pretty good). I also confirmed my estimated motor size and gearing by current limiting the Swerve V3 to match the achievable torques of this new swerve.

Similarly, this uses my cheapest, smallest custom controller (distant ancestor of Mini Cheetah controller).

I haven’t decided yet if this will become a kit, if I’ll open source, or if I’ll just answer questions, but in the meantime, I already helped one of the FRC kids I mentor build his own spin of this design which will hopefully be competing at the next Rival event.

Here are some quick videos of initial bring-up. The tipping is to prove that the robot has enough torque.