Team 2883 electoral board
 

After several hours of planning, laying out, and hair-pulling-out, we may have finished our board. We plan on connecting talons or srxs to different areas of the chassis frame, to minimize board size. A spike might be added too, not sure where though. Comments, ideas?
Ha ha, nice catch on electoral board! I was wondering who would catch it first!
Aside from the fact that I am covering up an embarrassing typo, it's name really is about the debates held between the people working on the electrical board and those people working on the frame of the robot. No one wanted to give up any space, so this is the product.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Looks sweet. What are the advantages of putting motor controllers assorted around the robot as opposed to near the PDP? Limited space?

What would you be using a spike for? I think the PCM can be used for most things a spike can, unless you absolutely need 20A.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Nice and compact. Also love the effort you guys put into the custom Ethernet cable.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

If Talon SRX's are used, which are already compact and rugged. They can be put around the robot as this allows, limit switches, sensors and encoders to be wired directly into the Talon SRX and have the data transmitted over CAN this means that there are actually less wires, especially less fragile ones.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Nice "electoral board". Its good to see a true American team building a robot that runs on democracy.

Ha ha, nice catch!

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

When I first clicked on the thread I thought that it would be about deciding team positions

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

What gauge wire do you have on the 40A breakers, it looks suspiciously like 14 AWG, and the rules state that it must be a minimum of 12 on the 40A rail

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

That is definitely 12awg. You can tell by looking at the wieldmueller connections with 14awg.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

It helps to remember that due to insulation thickness not being standard, two different 12 AWG wires can be vastly different sizes. This has tripped me up in the past as well.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Looks really nice! I dig the clean wiring and routing design.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Covering up the Amp size of the breaker may cause problems during inspection. R40 - breakers visible, R48 - max size breaker per load, and R49 min wire size per breaker.

R34 may be an issue at your breaker - "fully insulated"

It is 12 guage, the board is a total of 8" by 18"

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Wow! That is really neatly done. I especially like how you used the Igus chain as a flexible wiring channel. For the last two years, we used the same sort of labels you are using and it was a big help in troubleshooting.

How will this be installed in your robot? Will the snap-action breakers be visible once the panel is mounted in its intended location? Will the status LED's on all those components be easily visible? Will the various terminal blocks be accessible for repair work and for modifications? Some of them require a use of a tool. Will you be able to get the required tools in? Did you use nuts on those screws and will the nuts be accessible (we had a real problem with this last season)? Is it sufficiently easy to plug an Ethernet cable into the router for operating in tether-mode? Will you be able to hold on to the battery cable well enough to disconnect the battery without jerking on the cables going to the breaker and PDP? Have you done a pull-test on all of the connections?

The radius of the bends in the 6AWG look very small, especially at the PDP end. I could only find tables and guides for the much larger wires that we use at work and they recommend a bend radius of at least 4 x the cable diameter. Bending the cable too tightly can break the strands inside.

If this panel will be mounted against a metal panel and/or in the very bottom of your chassis, it would be best to mount your router somewhere else.

You should allow some slack in your wiring to allow for repair work and troubleshooting. Specifically, the CAN wires between the RoboRio and the PCM and the power cable from the VRM and your router. Keeping your wiring short is good but there is such a thing as "too short"

It would be best not to route wires over the access points for terminal blocks like with the Ethernet cable.

This will be mounted on the top of our robot. We plan on using lexan and 3d printed parts to make a lid with access ports for the either net, fuses, breaker, etc.

How the board will exactly mount to the chassis is being debated. To get the tight radius on the wires, we bent them before crimping the connectors. This way, the stands were aloud to shift around the radius (the inside wires of the bend were longer then the outside, naturally). The CAN wire is longer then what it looks like, it is beneath the radio. All of the wires that leave the board are 2 feet long.

We had a discussion about pull testing the ends, and I can assure you that all of them were yanked on multiple times.

The battery connection has changed since the picture, it now bends around under the board were it will be mounted to a plastic block else on the robot.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Interesting use of energy chain, I like it. I'd be worried about that tight bend on the wire between the PDP and breaker- looks like it's being pinched quite a bit.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

I understand your pain of having a limited space... we're probably going to have a main electronics board about that size - if we're lucky

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

That would be cool to see. The pull test got our electrical failure rate way down in the last two years.

I am currently working with my son to lay out our electronics inside our robot. With the mechanical design we have, it will be even more tight than what you have.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Looks very neat! The only thing I can comment on is the radio. This is a new radio so teams don't have a lot of info or in match data. However, the antennas for this radio exist just behind the sides of the radio so placing the radio near any metal will tend to attenuate the signals and provide serious reflections to the RF transmit circuitry. My recommendation is to place the radio high in your robot away from metallic structures for best performance.

Re: Team 2883 electoral board
 

Mentor Mac here. More then likely it will fail inspection. You won't be able to see the lights on the radio by the FTA's and the Refs. 2nd You will bury the main breaker from easy access. That's a no, no, sorry. Thomas (just give me a crabcake) McCubbin God Bless