2718 Progress Update

[noahzemlin]

Howdy! I'm with FRC team 2718 and we've been playing on and off with the Systemcore since we got it a few months ago. We've had a few bits of confusion (see bottom of post), but otherwise we've had very few issues in our early tests.

Initially, we tried drop-in replacing the Systemcore into our 2025 Reefscape bot. It was 90% successful, but the remaining 10% kept us from actually keeping it in for the NTX Tournament of Robotics offseason event we are attending this weekend (Oct 25/26). That 10% was mostly just from lack of vendor library support (swerve libraries, LIDAR library, etc) and hesitation from spending too much time trying to figure out how to get them in 2027.

Fortunately, we are competing with a second robot at NTX and our offseason robot wearing 9992 will be featuring the Systemcore! This robot was designed to be simple (it was entirely built by incoming new team members) which made it a perfect test bench. The robot we'll be testing the Systemcore on at NTX features:

• SDS Swerve MK4i Modules
  • CTRE Kraken x60 drive motors
  • REV NEO steer motors
  • Thriftybot magnetic absolute encoder (i.e. 4x analog voltage inputs)
• Arm (w/ absolute encoder) and end effector motors
• Elastic dashboard

(Robot pictures coming soon...)

After NTX, we are planning to use this offseason bot as a training bot for the programming team and we'll then get to test vision tracking via coprocessor, game piece sensors (LIDAR, photoelectric), and other common hardware.

Excited to report more updates after NTX this weekend!

Testing notes:

• Windows firewall seems to be extra picky with the Systemcore. The same computer with the same firewall settings seems to be able to talk to the roborio v2 (i.e. no driver station errors) but have issues with the Systemcore. Unfortunately I didn't snoop enough into this at the time and the issue seems to have magically resolved itself since.
• When we first saw the screen randomly turn off and back on, we thought we were getting brownout issues despite nothing on the robot running. This was just a failure to read documentation closely enough as this is an intended feature lol.
• It's well reported as this point, but our Systemcore definitely also gets very hot when on for a while. This contributed to the previous point and initial fear of brownout.