Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We have been considering using Anderson Power Pole connectors in conjunction with the new Victor SP or Talon SRX. Here is an example of the connectors we are considering.

The concern I have is their current rating is 45 Amps. When we do the calculation on possible max current we may pull through them is a pushing match etc, we come up with numbers that are 50% higher than that quite often.
I realize the pushing match current is usually a short term current, but sometimes it runs a several seconds longer than desired.

So, what has been your experience with these, or this type of connector when used in drive trains?

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We use them and love them. They work great. We have been using them for about 5+ years now and have not had any issues with over-drawing current or wires or connectors getting hot.

The biggest issue we have had with them is not being crimped properly. We do pull testing now to help with that though.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

That rating is continuous not peak.

They handle the load just fine.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

To add some perspective for you, the current rating for the main battery connector (made by the same company) is 50 Amps.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Excellent. that is what I thought but wanted to make sure.
I have read reviews about the need to make sure to do the crimping properly, so we will make sure to study up on that and learn to do it right.

THANKS!

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

I had the same original concerns last year when we decide to try them out. If you want to take a look at the datasheets for in-rush current and temperature rise at continuous load they are available on Anderson's website: http://www.andersonpower.com/product...onnectors.html

Our team loved using them and they definitely saved us a lot of trouble with screwdrivers in tight spaces when we decided to replace every Jaguar on our drivetrain with a Victor Saturday afternoon of our first regional last year. Buy more contacts than the amount of connectors you plan on using so you have some spares when they don't get crimped properly.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We have used these for a long time and love them. The key is to have a good crimper, don't skimp and purchase a cheep one.

The one we use.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

+1 if you are going to use Power Pole connectors you need a tool specifically designed for the Power Pole terminals. A ratcheting one is best because it insures that it is fully crimped. If the person operating it doesn't have the hand strength to properly complete the crimp you will know.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We have been using them for years, and have never looked back.

I will echo what others have said, having the correct crimper makes all the difference. There is a link in my signature for the crimper we use. We have two of them.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We have been using them for years and absolutely love them. If you are worried about the max amps you can get anderson powerpoles in multiple different sizes, all the way up to 350 amps. the different sizes are here: Anderson Powerpoles

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

I was making them for my FTC team, and couldn't find anything about how to do it (I even searched youtube). When putting the clip in the plastic connector, you'll need force (I was scared about using too much force and getting it stuck in the wrong position -- which you can't do) :D Good luck!

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

If it makes you feel any better, the continuous current rating of the 12AWG wire on a CIM motor is 41 amps.

Even after 126 matches of pushing in Aerial Assault we saw no evidence of overheated Power-poles.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

You can assemble these with the contacts in various orientations (--, -|, ||,...) so that you can have "special circuits" that can not be plugged into other circuits. I don't recall how many combinations can be achieved so just play with the housings when you get them.

It will take a fair amount of force to un-mate the housings. You can also use a small screwdriver to disengage the retaining tongue and remove the contact from the housing, allowing the housings to be reused.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

14 AWG is rated for 32 continuous amps, reinforcing the point that the Anderson PP45 contacts are adequate.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

I think they are without peer for FRC applications.

I highly recommend the official crimp tool from Anderson as have others. I will add that you need a variety of terminals (15A, 30A, & 45A) to suit different gauge wires that you want to crimp to.

Other best practices:
Tie wrap the connections together to prevent accidental unplugging.

Use different colors on the battery side of the speed controller/spike (e.g. red/black) than on the motor side (e.g. white/blue).

Make a Gold Master bit of wire that you can use to keep your polarity consistent when you make connections. You will be switching things around an you don't want to burn up a Victor or have a motor run backwards.

Make a special tool from a cheap pliars that will let you separate housings. I will post a picture of this when I get back to Boston but it is basically it involves grinding away half of each leg of the pliars. This tool lets you split the two housings easily, which can be a real pain (a literal pain actually) to do, especially if you're in a hurry.

Dr. Joe J.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Thanks for the "Best Practices" Joe!

I really like the custom ground "cheap pliers" trick, guaranteed that will happen!

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

What is your source for this?

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Glad to help. I am sure there are others have good tips to share as well.

Two more I just realized

On the motor connections I recommend using an "off standard" color (e.g. green) on one lead. That one lead is the one that positive voltage makes the motor go FORWARD/RIGHT/UP. This is very useful when you are debugging. You can hook up an outside power supply and know which ready the wheels will spin or the arm will move.

The next tip is powerwerx.com
Which is your one stop shop for all things Anderson Power Pole.

Share your tips.

Dr. Joe J.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Checkout http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

There is no one size fits all ampacity chart, as mentioned the link above

Here is a good calculator http://www.wirebarn.com/Wire-Calculator-_ep_41.html which does allow you to include the total circuit length and desired maximum voltage drop.

Note it does not take into affect the insulation type and the CIM uses high temp insulation since it goes inside the motor where it is subject to heating caused by the motor. It is also a very short section of wire. That is why we are required to use 12ga with a CIM if we want it to be connected to a 40a breaker even if the wire that exits the CIM is 14ga.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We used them last year along with a detachable drive rail design that made any drive maintenance an absolute breeze. Highly recommend them!

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

One more tip. This is the first year I have purchased this pick tool for removing wires/terminals from housings.

For $12 I think it is a good addition to the toolbox. Yes, you can live without it but it works pretty well.

Also, I recommended using cable ties (aka tie wraps) to hold connections together. Other teams swear by these BLOK LOK Clamps. I used them one year but at $1.39 each it seemed like cable ties were a better solution. What do others think?

Also, I see there is another option I have never tried. These Retention Clips These are only $0.49 each. Still not as cheap as a cable tie, but more reasonable than the BLOK LOK. has anyone had success using these? Do Tell...

Dr. Joe J.

I've always used a cable tie, zip tie or however many more names they go by.
But 49 cents isn't bad at all.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

One of the great things about power poles is that they don't accidentally unplug. The connectors are angled towards each other so that the spring in the contact holds the connector on, not friction. If you get enough force to unplug a power pole connector, I'd rather have it disconnect than start ripping crimp connections or components apart.

What's the advantage of mis-matched colors? We used all red-black last year, matching the wires. We were thinking of using the colors as labels, but we would have used the same color housing on both sides to ensure we made the correct connection, saving some sticky labels. The biggest reason we didn't do this is it would require that we re-terminate a motor to use it in a different location on the robot; last year we had generic spares with connectors pre-crimped, and just had to add a label.

Also, power poles make their own polarity enforcer. Just orient all of the poles the same direction, and there's only one way to connect the equivalent mate. In order to make them non-polarity-enforcing, you'd have to make a shape with 180-degree rotational symmetry. All of these 2-pole shapes I can find would require that you connect two tongues or two grooves together.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We were considering using the Anderson connectors for motors, but thought about other possibilities. We came up with the XT60 connector that Hobbyking and other RC companies sell for connecting those high-current LiPo battery packs to quadcopters. Low cost, simple solder connection, keyed for polarity protection.

We bought a few bags of thee, and will see how they do.

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/s...arehouse_.html

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

They're not insanely cheaper than andersons, and require soldering so they take far more time.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

To apply XT60s properly, you need to also use heat shrink, or electrical tape, to cover the back side of the terminals. That is not required with the Anderson connectors.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We started using power poles for the first time this past year, and we purchased a large supply of the retention clips to go with our housings, and used them on every connection. We used them on a competition bot, practice bot, and a third off-season bot. All told, our robot went through four different competitions and we never had a problem with a wire coming unplugged.

Unrelated to the clips, Powerwerx sells these housings, which we used throughout the season. Those housings are bonded and as such have built in polarity protection. We may have had one of these seperate, but it was not on the robot and I believe it went through a serious trauma (hit with a hammer).

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

The ultrasonically welded housings are great. I'd never buy the individual housings, because there aren't many scenarios where you need to keep the + and the - wire separate. Plus you can use the hole where the roll-pin normally goes to run a zip-tie through for locking.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We use the individual housings and we never use the roll pins. Zip ties going across the backs of the housings have worked fine for us. Some of the reasons I like individual ones, they are normally cheaper, you can have multiple colors, and if you need to quickly invert a motor direction you can do it without pulling the contacts out of the housings.

I've been using them since I started in FRC in 2003 and wouldn't want to use any other connector.

I bought some green and yellow ones to use with the CAN wires this year, we'll see how that goes.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Ouch! for what they cost, I'd have a kid superglue them if them being bonded is that important to you.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

I just bought a bunch of Green, Yellow, and white housings from Powerwerx to match the wires on the speed controllers. They have a whole spectrum of colors, so between mixing terminal rotation and colors you can make different connectors for each motor, sensor, etc.

We are hoping to use the andersons for quick disconnects for our CAN bus as well - anyone see an issue with that?

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We've been using the powerpoles for several years now. We do not zip tie or use anything other than the natural friction between the connectors. The only issue we've had is the occasional plugging the wrong things together. We've never had anything come undone during competition. Mind you, we also make sure our robot wiring is fairly neat and well secured to the robot. We avoid birds nests on the robot.

It's overkill and very large, but this is FIRST. The PP15 crimp is for 16-20 AWG wire, just make sure you don't try using 22 AWG or the crimps won't work. During beta testing, we used 19AWG wire (I didn't even realize 19 existed until just now) and have had no issues. This included running it through an offseason competition.

I'm considering using some new connectors from molex but they won't be available until March, so next season?

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We ordered the 15A connectors for the CAN bus wires and 18 gauge stranded hookup wire. I thought it was overkill, but if you're going to do it, you may as well overdo it :]

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

and

I've been thinking about this for the last few days. I really wish there was a 50% size PowerPole housing with ~5 amp contacts, for use on the CAN/PWM wires on the new Talons. The polarized but non-gendered PowerPoles are well-suited to the CAN daisy chaining, and for color coding the ends of PWM cables. Anderson doesn't make a smaller housing, and I've been unable to find something similar from any other manufacturer.

We've been using PowerPoles for the last two years, color coding pigtails attached to spikes and jaguars for quick swaps (red/black on supply green/gray on loads). They are awesome for this, but it just seems wrong to use the same connectors for high current power and low current signaling. Our friend Murphy has shown us time and again that there is no limit to what a new and under-mentored student can plug together incorrectly.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Oh, I've done that myself. I have this bad habit of connecting the output of a TALON to the output of the PDB or some other motor controller. I may try using your color coding change this year.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Yes, those look good! And with the 2.50 mm pitch, we can probably adapt them to 0.1" pin tech for the relatively short runs.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

In re-reading, I've answered my own question. The point here is not to have the connectors between the PDB and the controller look like the ones between the controller and the motor. That never occurred to me as a problem, because we never use connectors between the PDB and the controller. Except for Ultimate Ascent, where we were jamming too many features into too small a space, we've managed to put the PDB and all of the motor controllers on the same control board, and run these wires directly. Another important thing to remember about connectors of any type is to remember that they are inherently a compromise - giving up some of the reliability of a continuous connection for the sake of maintainability, flexibility, or convenience.

GO TEAMS!

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

Our team purchased a shrink tubbing label printer for this year. Hopefully all wires will now be clearly marked to simplify tracing and reduce the chance of a connector being plugged into the wrong connector.

How many connectors do you typically have on a robot? I believe we generally only have 1 per motor.

Steve

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

During beta test, we used the 2-pin 0.1" latching polarized connectors from Hansen Hobbies (http://www.hansenhobbies.com/product...nlpconnectors/) for CAN bus cabling. The pin size and spacing are the same as PWM. The housings are a tiny bit bigger, but the latching and polarization features won me over. Hanson also sells 3-pin versions for those who want to make their Talon SRX'es dual use. We're planning to use these connectors on our robot in 2015.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

I completely glossed over this, but that looks like what I'd like to use, except for not being able to color code them like the power poles. I guess Sharpies would work. Bummer that they are unobtainium until March.

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

We've been having problems with the 12AWG stranded wire on the Victor SP's being too large for the PowerPole PP30 12-14 AWG contacts. We haven't had any problems with other 12AWG wire - has anyone else run into this?

Re: Anderson Power Pole for motors
 

It's a common problem that finely stranded wire has a considerably larger outer diameter than the solid round wire of the same gauge. I've seen that issue with other crimp connectors.

Maybe you could try Anderson's open-topped crimps instead of the ones with the closed barrel? Anderson sells slightly larger "super flex" connectors in some sizes that are intended to solve this specific problem.

Alternatively, it wouldn't be the end of the world to lose a few strands out of a 259-strand wire (if that's what they're using) over a short distance. The impact in terms of resistance would be negligible.