Screw Wire Connector

[Jon Stratis]

After the 2011 North Star regional, we threw some into our standard kit of parts, although they're only used in emergency situations. At North Star that year, we started burning out FP motors during elims, after only one or two matches. We didn't have the time to figure out or fix the mechanical reasons for this at the competition, so we just started swapping in new motors to keep the beast running. Needless to say, at that point having some wire nuts handy would have made swapping new motors in a lot quicker and easier! We managed to get the connections soldered each time, but it was always a serious time crunch to get the swap done in time. As Al said, you want as few splices as possible... but situations like this are ideal for making a quick splice instead of running the wire through the entire robot.

[Akash Rastogi]

We used them on parts of the robot that were swapped out with our main and competition bots or for testing purposes.

[DonRotolo]

Used properly (and every container of these - bag or box - MUST contain proper usage instructions) wire nuts are as good as just about anything. And they're available in sizes for almost anything you'd use on a robot. For big (>10 ga) or small (<20 ga) they are not optimal.

That being said, we don't use them, since we try to avoid splices and wire nuts are not better than a proper solder connection. For connections that need to come apart, we use connectors.