[tsaksa]

Our team had similar trouble in the past with all of the breakout boards, but decided to go another route. This year we used a header and a small piece of proto board to connect the existing break out boards to a short converter cable with a more standard D type connector at the end. This short converter cable has the standard D connector end mounted rigidly to the same board as the CRio,

The new pigtail cable adaptor makes it simple and easy to plug in a few large connectors from a wiring harness to the electronics board instead of a maze of PWM cables. Our wiring is starting to look a lot more like what you might find in a typical car engine compartment. The pigtail converter cable that makes this possible is quick and easy to build, low cost, and seems to be much more robust than individual PWM cables.

We took this approach only partly for reliability. The bigger reason was money. Our team wanted several working robots. A dedicated demo robot, a practice robot, and wanted to keep some of the older robots around for demos and learning. In the past our team was nbever able to do this because we only have two CRios, and no money to buy more right now, and during the build season old robots get canalized for parts. But, doing it this way now gives us a modular electronics package that can be swapped between robots by only removing a few standard connectors.

We have also done this with the digital i/o board but that took more effort because you needed an unusual 13X3 header. We could not find the exact connector from our usual sources and needed to make our own from smaller connectors. The simple process of moving from several 3 pin PWM connectors to a single larger connector seems to make a huge difference in ease of use and ruggedness without the need to fully replace the existing breakout boards.

Tom