Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

Is anyone here familiar with how the Robonauts achieved the "snap-in" victor mounts featured in the beginning of this video? I thought it was pretty ace the first time I saw it, and I'd love to see how they did it.

I know it's the summer, but if anyone from the Robonauts has pictures of the mounts, could you post them up here?

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

This year, my team(3339) did not have any elecronics board.
The Jags were ziptied in pairs and we just put them on a 90 degree aluminium. It was easy to remove them by hand but they never fell off! (because of friction)

photos of our robot electronics.

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

Matt,
Frequently teams will use velcro to attach components. We have in the past. Please don't be fooled by the coincidence of the power coming on when the victor is pushed into place. It was already wired.

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

This year, we (4183) was very successful using heavy-duty Velcro to secure our speed controllers to the robot's aluminum belly pan. Our C-RIO (I'm not sure about the capitalization :ahh: ) was bolted onto a piece of plywood, along with our bridge. We had no issues with any of our electronics attachments. In the future, however, we are probably going to mount all the electronics to one board for easier access and neater wiring.

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

We used quarter inch corrugated polycarbonate sheeting for our board, and nylon bolts/nuts on most of the stuff, with "industrial" velcro on the rest. Both fastening methods worked great and the board was pretty light. The only (slight) issue we had with it was drilling into the polycarb, we couldn't get the holes smooth because of the material's thinness.

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

This year was one of our best electrical boards. We took a thin piece of Lexan and bent up each side. This was then attached through a hinge on one side and some bolts (with rivet nuts in the frame) on the other to the bottom of our robot, forming the bottom pan. Everything was bolted onto that using button heads to ensure they wouldn't catch on the carpet. It provided a very clean look, while being very serviceable (pull out a couple of bolts and the board swung down with no robot parts in the way). Just about every other electrical board we've had, we've had to work around other robot components... designing it to just swing down and out completely solves that problem!

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

Very cool. But doesn't it force you to use longer wires between the hinged board and the main robot? (I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, just checking that I understand you and/or how you handled it.)

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

That depends on how you route your wires :) If you look at each motor and wire individually, you might be tempted to run it from the motor to the frame however is easiest, then leave enough slack so it can stretch when you open the board.

However, if you plan ahead, you can run all of your motor wires down the same side of the robot and then directly across the hinge. Now, instead of needing to stretch "up" when you unhinge the board, they simply rotate with the hinge and everything stays neat and tied down. This way, there is very little, if any, extra wire needed for this design. Note that a prerequisite for this design is a neat board, not a rats nest of loose wires!

As a bonus, this design makes it a lot easier for inspectors to check off the electrical section of the robot, as you can open it up for inspection and they can easily see everything!

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

Mr. Stratis, you wouldn't happen to have any pictures of this set up, would you? I'm having trouble envisioning a robot with enough ground clearance (or ground clearance in an accessible spot) where a bellypan can fold down. I do like your method of wiring it correctly rather than the easiest method.

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Well you really wouldn't need any ground clearance, it's easy enough to just flip it over on it's side or make a stand that gives you the clearance you need.

We actually used a similar concept this year, only on the top of the robot rather than the bottom. The PDB, IO Board, and a Jags sat on top of a hinged piece of aluminum. The other end of it was held down by 3 10-24s, which also held on the rear lexan shield. The rest of the Jags sat on a second plate underneath the hinged plate. I don't have a picture of the top plate, but I do have one of everything that sat beneath it.

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I think this is the best picture I have available:


The pan drops down from the KoP frame 1 inch, and we used standard 6-inch wheels. In order to drop the pan, you have to tilt the robot on its side. A small inconvenience, but considering how rarely we need to access it during competition, it's an acceptable one.

What you can't see here is how all of the pieces fit together on top. The cRio fits between the CIM motors for the drivetrain, with the 4 Jaguars for those motors sitting directly under the motors themselves (without the hinged design, this would be a service nightmare). The PDB and DSC are the most accessible/visible while the board is up, as the LEDs built into them are important for quick diagnosing of issues. The Victors sit under the ball collector, with just enough clearance to fit. We ended up adding a fifth Jaguar in the big empty space later (at this time, we weren't sure if we wanted a single Jaguar or two Victors, the mechanical design wasn't complete).

All together, if there had been any serious issues, the board really isn't serviceable from the top, it has to be dropped down. This design did help us get a lot of weight very low in the robot - otherwise, we would have had to build it more vertically and had a higher center of gravity.

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We used a Garolite sheet as a base for our electronics. After going through some plywood prototypes to determine the ideal configuration to use short wires, maintain neatness and accessibility, and keep everything arranged logically (with the power distribution board being close to the battery and breaker, the C-RIO being close to the DIO, etc.) we started arranging the components on our Garolite. We drilled holes that lined up with the components' holes. We added foam tape to the electronics before attaching them snugly (but not too tight) with zip ties, to effectively shock mount them. The zip ties proved effective, allowing us to easily remove and swap parts, but not breaking randomly. We used zip tie squares for cable management.

Overall, our electronics board this year was successful. The worst failure we had was a loose Wago connection.

Note: The products that I listed are not exactly what we used, but are fairly similar. I couldn't quickly find exactly what we used.

Re: Screws, Tape, and other Electronic securities
 

You guys might like using CAD. We didn't have components to spare to rearrange and figure out the best configuration (and I was to lazy to do the whole paper-method thing), but downloading the parts from the online KOP library and moving them around the board was really nice!

I'm starting to like the sound of the zip-ties and tape.... They seem so convenient! It's never something our team's really done, but we could try it out next year.