14 awg wire on motors
 

Our CIM motors have 14 awg wire coming out.
Does that mean we're stuck with a max of 30A breakers?
or is there some weird exclusion here?

Re: 14 awg wire on motors
 

There is a weird exclusion. See the text under the table in R38. Use a 40 amp breaker, and #12 wire.
Connect the #12 wire to the Motor Controller.
Connect the wire built into the CIM (regardless of wire gauge) to the motor controller.

Re: 14 awg wire on motors
 

The latter. There's a note under the table in R38.

Re: 14 awg wire on motors
 

That's the rule. Here's a possible explanation.

Re: 14 awg wire on motors
 

Keep in mind that if you lengthen the motor wires you still need to use 12ga or larger. I'll be at Northstar but not as an inspector so I'm looking forward to checking out your robot!

Re: 14 awg wire on motors
 

Internally to our team, we not only follow the gauges specified, but try to keep our runs down to 3 to 5 ft (1 - 1.5m). If we go much longer than that for motor wires, we'll bump to the next larger wire. We aren't as picky on signal-level, though we do a few checks to verify that the switches are reliably noted by the 'RIO. This year, we had originally planned to put our control panel at the highest level that our shortest control person could easily work on. However, for CoG reasons, we had put the battery and every motor as low as possible. The board came down.