4917 Progress Update

[ericgaudet]

I have posted elsewhere but I like the idea of having a summary of what we've tried/accomplished, so here goes.

We have successfully ported all of our code/functions from our 2025 competition bot to the SystemCore!

That means the following hardware is running:

• USB Canivore to Pigeon and Swerve modules (SDS MK4 with Kraken X60 for drive, Falcon 500 for turning and CANcoder encoder)
• Traditional CAN to elevator (2 Kraken X60), arm (Neo on SparkMax), climb (Kraken X60), and custom circuit boards
• Custom circuit boards were design by students and run off an Arduino Nano. They allow us to read sensors and drive LEDs via CAN. We use the fairly low-level WPILib calls to access the CAN bus to talk to them. Worked first try, which is impressive!
• We use 4 digital inputs for limit switches. We had to flip the pinout for the pull-up/down resistor change (won't be an issue when we create a robot for the SystemCore instead of the robotRIO in the future).
• We have two limit switches go directly into the SparkMax, as well as a Rev through-bore absolute encoder
• We are not using I2C, SPI, UART.

As of today, the robot has successfully driven a few hours on the field with no issues. We plan on competing at an offseason event (STEMley in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) on Sun Nov 2. We'll be encouraging other teams to come see this new controller.

You folks have done a great job on this alpha product! In my professional experience, alphas are rarely this solid.