Swerve Drive Annoyance

Currently in our robotics team, the entire technical subteam is making VEX robots to play a miniturized version of the 2001 FRC game. Each team of four is required to use a certain drivetrain. The problem is that the team that was assigned the swerve drive used exactly eight motors (two more than anybody else had on the whole robot) for their drivetrain alone, and is also using more than one microcontroller. While I understand the usage of eight motors due to the instructions on the swerve kit, I’m not so sure of the extra microcontroller due to the possibility of using y-cables.

Would the use of Y-cables significantly affect the amount of force exerted by the drive motors? Also, would it not be advisable to use knobby wheels with the swerve kit?

I personally wouldn’t use the knobby wheels. I am fairly the subject of Y-cables and decreasing power per motor if you use them was brought up before. The answer was, if I’m correct that, No, the Y-cables do not divide the power in half.

I’ll try and dig up the thread.

This thread talks about Y-cables and their power per motor. Look about Post 31 and down.

You can have the Link include the starting page with the “&page=4” specifier, like so…

https://vexforum.com/t/tomahawk-help/13498/1&page=4&highlight=Y-cables