Quote:
Originally Posted by jonboy
Everyone's advice is to label all your wires. I agree.
The real trick is how to do it? Therefore, my question is what are your techniques, part numbers, and suppliers to accomplish the wire labelling task both for power, signal and PWM cables?
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We've used this or something equivalent last year when I was mentoring wiring, and had no complaints:
http://www.digikey.com/product-detai...STD-C-ND/30738
Though really, the product really doesn't matter - we've used everything from the 10-color label tapes to 10-digit number tapes to zip-ties with the built-in label area that you write on with a sharpie. The only labels we had which did NOT work were some cheap little sticky-tape numbers that didn't wrap around the wires and always fell off - I don't know the brand. For simple projects (not the competition 'bot), we have just used a single different color tiny zip tie at each end. When we use color (as we did last year), we'll use the same color for the PWM cables as the motor cables - no one has yet managed to confuse three 20GA wires with a Dupont connector from two 12 GA wires with Anderson power poles. This way, we also label the motor, motor controller, and slot on the sidecar with the same color tape. If you decide to go to a second color on each wire (to expand beyond say, 10), do not try to use complementary pairs (e.g. both blue-red and red-blue) - this will cut you to 55 pairs plus 10 singles, but that should be enough!
Also, you can generate pretty decent wiring harness graphics on a budget just using power point or a similar drawing program. Develop a schematic image for each of your components (A black and two grey cylinders make a CIM, for example), and use the "connectors" line features as wires and hoses so you can move items around and the wires will follow. Of course, also color-tag the items on your diagram! At least once a week during build season, or every re-wire if more frequent, go through the wiring, comparing the actual wires, the wiring team's diagrams, and the programmers source code constants to make sure that everything's connected correctly. At the same time, make sure that everything's connected securely!