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Unread 18-12-2013, 02:42
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FRC #0492 (Titan Robotics)
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Re: How to wire unrealistically well?

Quote:
Originally Posted by artdutra04 View Post
Think of wires like cars. You can only drive your car along roads - if you take a shortcut through someone else's property they will get mad. In cites such as New York City, roads arranged in a square/rectangular grid pattern make it easy to navigate. To make your wiring look neat and easy to work on, we will follow this same virtual "road" grid pattern.

This means your wiring should only travel in straight orthogonal directions, and always make clean right angle corners*. To make corners that look good, use a very high strand count wire - in general the more strands a wire has, the more flexible it will be. The more flexible wire is, the easier it is to tame and make it travel along these "roads".

This will cause large sections of your wiring to all begin running along the same path - think of these like your trunk line "highways". Sometimes this means wires intentionally take longer paths than necessary to keep these wires on dedicated "roads", like visible in this photo of FRC 973:

But this solution only deals with the power wires - you still need to deal with the signal/PWM/sensor wires. Keeping with the same city analogy, we need to treat these as a subway or monorail and route them on a different level from the cars on the main level.

While running wires underneath a control panel might not always be feasible (especially if it is your belly pan), one idea that works really well is to build pylons using a small (#8/32 or smaller)
Our team also wired the electronics board like elevated highways. We used standoff and P clamps. To save space, we actually screwed the standoffs on top of the Jaguar's mounting holes doubled as the screws securing them. The outside mounting holes hosted the "power" highway and the inner mounting holes hosted the "signal" highway.
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Last edited by mikets : 18-12-2013 at 06:23.