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Unread 18-12-2013, 10:23
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Nemo Nemo is offline
Team 967 Mentor
AKA: Dan Niemitalo
FRC #0967 (Iron Lions)
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Re: How to wire unrealistically well?

I think a big piece of clean wiring is having enough space for the components. The example pictures are from 254, 968, 973, and 1538: all West Coast Drive teams. WCD has its outer rails as far as possible to the outside, so the middle area for electronics is as big as it can be. It's also possible to get that much space using sheet aluminum chassis. Making wiring look that clean with a C-Base chassis is much more difficult because there's way less space between the rails. We've used C-base in the past three years, and we've had to build a second level for electronics in each case. Having two levels adds some additional challenges for getting the wiring to be organized and nice looking. That was especially true last year with the reduced maximum robot perimeter; the perimeter got smaller, but the power board / CIM motors / cRio / battery / etc still took up the same amount of space on the drive base. Doesn't leave much room for motor controllers.

I just looked up some pictures of our wiring - wow, wires are running in every direction. I'll have to make sure our wiring people read Art's advice before we let them wire anything this year. I can think of a couple of egregiously long wires/cables in particular that irritated the crap of me last year, and people ignored me when I told them to fix it... this year those are getting torn out overnight. Thanks for the pro tip, CD!