Chief Delphi - Pros and cons of electronics boards/boxes

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Re: Pros and cons of electronics boards/boxes

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cuog

One thing our Team(422) has done is a modular Circuit board that can be easily removed in about five minutes. This was for mechanical issues and at the VCU regional this year it allowed us to get to our motors and save a gear bfore it died.

For a box i would recomend looking at pictures of the insides of computers and looking at how they are set up:
-Bundled wires are your friends for organization
-logical placement and no wiretangling is a must
-COOLING chips create heat, motor controllers create heat, LET IT GO SOMEWHERE, FIRST gives you muffin fans use them! if you don't cool a box your victors may shut down on you because they got too hot during a match.

And if u have some extra wieght make a water cooling system and cooling blocks, I'm trying to get my team to do this but its still a no go :(

If you're generating enough heat to need water cooling than something is very wrong. A P4 or Xeon can easily be popped up over 4Ghz without melting using water cooling (I'd use AMD though), I don't think the RC is going to get anywhere near that. And, if the Victors are getting that hot, there is likely something quite unsafe going on.

Re: Pros and cons of electronics boards/boxes

Thanks for all the info everyone. It's great.

What is the advantage to having a REMOVABLE box?
As opposed to something either just easily accessible without moving robot components apart/somewhere else or to something hinging out but staying attached to the robot.
I don't see much point in making your electronics removable? You have to spend all that time disconnecting the wires anyway; you might as well have fixed the problem there in that amount of time.

Thanks all
~Stephanie

Re: Pros and cons of electronics boards/boxes

With the water cooling for our team its mainly to cool motors because our overheat alot after the regionals when we use the robots for long demos and such, I think its cool but for competitions it is a little useless.

A removeable cirsuitbard is so that if i need to fix one of the motors at the bottom instead of unbuilding the robot to fix it i lift up the electronics cover, remove the mass coupler(all our motors go through this very nifty) and lift out the electronics board.

Re: Pros and cons of electronics boards/boxes

So you remove the electronics board to get to other things that need fixed, not to fix electronics?

Re: Pros and cons of electronics boards/boxes

pretty much, if we have to fix electronics we just remove the lexan cover from on top of them and boom! all our electronics are right there.