Mission:

NERDSwerve was born to fix the resource barriers that many new FRC teams face when looking to develop their own swerve drive and programs. Many FRC teams struggle to adopt swerve drive because of a financial barrier and the inability to develop a codebase and train their students on it.  NERDSwerve is designed to be low cost, easy to manufacture, easy to build and maintain, highly portable and mimic exactly the control electronics environment found on a full size FRC robot. NERDSwerve aims to allow coders to directly transfer code between NERDSwerve and competition robots. 

History:

Spring '23- TurdSwerve 0.0 is created as a low-resource testing bot.  It uses an interesting drivetrain - a drivetrain with single 3D-printed swerve pod, a powered omni wheel, and an omni caster mounted on a triangular base plate that resembled a poop emoji. The robot quickly picks up the name "TurdSwerve".

Summer '23- TurdSwerve 1.0 development starts.  Still using the original pod design, the chassis is now a square with 2 swerve pods in opposite corners and 2 omni wheel casters on the other 2 corners. This design is first introduced to Chief Delphi in January '24. 

Winter '23-24 - TurdSwerve 1.1 introduces Onshape configurations to the TurdSwerve design, allowing it to be adapted for any motor and battery. 

Spring '24 - 6 TurdSwerve robots are built and released to NERD Spark (FRC team 9312) programmers. They spend the offseason working with the platform to understand reliability and usability. 

Spring '24 - SuperTurd 1.2 reconfigures a TurdSwerve to use Kraken X60s and 4 pods on an L6 drive ratio, along with flipping the battery horizontally to lower the center of mass. 

Summer '24 - TurdSwerve 2.0 development starts. Using online feedback from TurdSwerve 1.1, a new drive pod is developed to resolve issues of axles falling out, gears breaking, and forks breaking. TurdSwerve 2.0 is released on Chief Delphi in August 2024.

Fall '24 - NERDSwerve 3.0 (no longer so turdy!) is developed. 3.0 adds a very inexpensive ball bearing to the swivel section and dramatically reduces friction.  Controllability at full speed is now possible, and TurdPod now matches the capability of a COTS swerve pod. After months of testing, the new design is proven to be highly tolerant to manufacturing variations, and robust through collisions and obstacles. Website and tutorials are developed to facilitate adoption by other FRC teams.