Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
...
Other best practices:
Tie wrap the connections together to prevent accidental unplugging.
Use different colors on the battery side of the speed controller/spike (e.g. red/black) than on the motor side (e.g. white/blue).
Make a Gold Master bit of wire that you can use to keep your polarity consistent when you make connections. You will be switching things around an you don't want to burn up a Victor or have a motor run backwards.
...
Dr. Joe J.
|
One of the great things about power poles is that they don't accidentally unplug. The connectors are angled towards each other so that the spring in the contact holds the connector on, not friction. If you get enough force to unplug a power pole connector, I'd rather have it disconnect than start ripping crimp connections or components apart.
What's the advantage of mis-matched colors? We used all red-black last year, matching the wires. We were thinking of using the colors as labels, but we would have used the same color housing on both sides to ensure we made the correct connection, saving some sticky labels. The biggest reason we didn't do this is it would require that we re-terminate a motor to use it in a different location on the robot; last year we had generic spares with connectors pre-crimped, and just had to add a label.
Also, power poles make their own polarity enforcer. Just orient all of the poles the same direction, and there's only one way to connect the equivalent mate. In order to make them non-polarity-enforcing, you'd have to make a shape with 180-degree rotational symmetry. All of these 2-pole shapes I can find would require that you connect two tongues or two grooves together.