Personally, I think people use stuff like the H-drive and plus drive because I think it would have a harder time being pushed around than other holonomic drives— an alternative to the mecanum if you really hate it. But I think the mecanum is a much better choice than the H and Plus drives because the H-drive’s middle wheel is trash (for many reasons) and where would the intake go on a plus drive?
The H-wheel isn’t “trash”. It needs to be tuned like any other mechanism. You can get a great advantage over other teams with well tuned mechanisms, even if those mechanisms arn’t “meta”. The H-Drive is like this too. Soooooo many teams throw together an H-drive with the purpose of building it so they can say “We built an H-drive” in their notebook and never actually consider it and improve on it. Yes, a single, stationary wheel for an H-drive is not very good, but if you add suspension or two pivoting wheels, then you mitigate the traction issues. I reccomend you do some research on H-drives in FRC and test some of them out before you put a blanket statement over them.
(I mean no offence with this post)
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I think you’re right, actually. I wasn’t really thinking about the two middle wheel design.
I can’t test prototypes at the moment though because I don’t have any supplies. Our robotics club provides that and they start during the school year. All I’m doing is prepping the notebook. I wish I could make prototypes though because most likely my team would want to jump right into making the bot and won’t want to wait for prototypes.
One word: CAD
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You can tell them that they’re more than welcome to go right ahead if they don’t mind scrambling 2 days before the tournament to fix their 341 mistakes, lol.
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By prototypes I mean building real life physical models that we can test out and see how they work, so I won’t have to stick with sources that may or may not be reliable and facts that may or may not be true, not to mention all the stuff I probably overlooked.
So watch this video, it’s great coverage of the H drive and a few things you can do to make it better
As a bonus their VIQ build tips video is worth watching.
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