[Vikesrock]

Trust me, you want to do this regardless of what the rule say you have to do. Last year our robot was designed with a winch system to lift other robots . The way the robot ended up being designed the electronics board ended up mounted directly above the winch so that the winch cable ran up through the electronics board. While we were performing a preliminary test with may things on the electronics board and winch in prototype stages a loose end of the wire rope winch cable hung down and contacted the positive terminal of a spike relay and some of the analog input pins on the RC. This led to some lovely arcing and smoke. Thankfully neither the Spike, nor the RC were totaled (we never ended up using those analog inputs so we still don't know if they work or not).

Moral of the story is: Insulate everything, always!