How to wire unrealistically well?

[kgzak]

I am generally really picky when it comes to wiring. The biggest thing I notice when it comes to wiring is make sure you dedicate space to the electronics. Often, the electronics are placed where they fit and not properly assigned a spot. Another thing that makes electronics messy is constantly fiddling with them. Moving them for other components, adding more electronics as parts are added and so on. When setting up an electronics board think about how the wires are going to run while setting up the layout. Wire way can be a nice addition to an electronics board as well as wire wrap for bundles of cable. As pretty much everyone has said, Zip Ties. Make sure to use them properly. If you are adding wire to an existing bundle of cable, cut the old zip ties as you add the new ones. It can make it look a LOT better. Labeling can help when there are connection that may appear as though they could go to multiple places (Side Car). Most often I don't see a need to label power because if cut to the proper length it is easy to see where they should go. Wire can also go in places that may otherwise be wasted (inside square tubing, tied inside C-channel and other enclosed areas that are safe) .One thing that can help is practice. The more electronics boards you build the more you will find ways to make them look better.

[Nathan Streeter]

Originally Posted by connor.worley

Here are a couple of examples of our wiring 2012 2013

In these photos it looks like for most of the length of the PDB <-> Victor power wires, both are black... did you heat shrink wire pairs along most of their length?

In many ways that seems like a great idea... it just uses a lot of heat shrink tubing!

[DampRobot]

Originally Posted by Nathan Streeter

In these photos it looks like for most of the length of the PDB <-> Victor power wires, both are black... did you heat shrink wire pairs along most of their length?

In many ways that seems like a great idea... it just uses a lot of heat shrink tubing!

Nope, they just align all their wire so the red is all on the bottom and the black is all on the top. The wire comes with the two strands grouped together, which makes wireing generally easier.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Nathan Streeter

In these photos it looks like for most of the length of the PDB <-> Victor power wires, both are black... did you heat shrink wire pairs along most of their length?

In many ways that seems like a great idea... it just uses a lot of heat shrink tubing!

As DampRobot said its wire that comes connected together and the top wire is black and red on the bottom.

We use the same stuff on our robot this year from McMaster (9697T3 and 9697T4) for both 14 and 12 gauge wire. It was great stuff as it stays together making wiring easier and pulls apart with no effort when you need to put connectors on the ends.

[artdutra04]

There is one secret to making wiring look neat like the two examples above, and that is to severely constrain yourself to where you can place wires.

Think of wires like cars. You can only drive your car along roads - if you take a shortcut through someone else's property they will get mad. In cites such as New York City, roads arranged in a square/rectangular grid pattern make it easy to navigate. To make your wiring look neat and easy to work on, we will follow this same virtual "road" grid pattern.

This means your wiring should only travel in straight orthogonal directions, and always make clean right angle corners*. To make corners that look good, use a very high strand count wire - in general the more strands a wire has, the more flexible it will be. The more flexible wire is, the easier it is to tame and make it travel along these "roads".

This will cause large sections of your wiring to all begin running along the same path - think of these like your trunk line "highways". Sometimes this means wires intentionally take longer paths than necessary to keep these wires on dedicated "roads", like visible in this photo of FRC 973:



But this solution only deals with the power wires - you still need to deal with the signal/PWM/sensor wires. Keeping with the same city analogy, we need to treat these as a subway or monorail and route them on a different level from the cars on the main level.

While running wires underneath a control panel might not always be feasible (especially if it is your belly pan), one idea that works really well is to build pylons using a small (#8/32 or smaller) standoff with male thread at the top, which is screwed into small (#8/32 or smaller set screw) shaft collars. The shaft collars act as a anchor point for a small 4" zip tie, and the standoffs elevate this above the rest of your wiring. You can then bundle all your PWM/sensor wiring along this trunk line.

I don't have a good photo of this from one of 148's recent robots, so here's a quick sketch instead:





* IMPORTANT! Do not make these corners too tight, or you will strain your wire and cause increased electrical resistance. Due to V=IR causing a voltage drop, this means your motors will always receive less voltage.

[Zaque]

If you really want unrealistic wiring, the method I have always thought of is a very large circuit board, with all of the wiring embedded in the wafer. This probably breaks several rules, as well as requiring a belly pan, which adds to the already high weight you would encounter with a PCB this size. Another problem would include the time required to print the board and much less capability of switching designs.

[m1506m]

Something like this,
Attachment 15574
This was from our summer build. It's just a matter of routing the wires neatly, and we don't like crimp connections, prefer to solder instead.

[mikets]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Think of wires like cars. You can only drive your car along roads - if you take a shortcut through someone else's property they will get mad. In cites such as New York City, roads arranged in a square/rectangular grid pattern make it easy to navigate. To make your wiring look neat and easy to work on, we will follow this same virtual "road" grid pattern.

This means your wiring should only travel in straight orthogonal directions, and always make clean right angle corners*. To make corners that look good, use a very high strand count wire - in general the more strands a wire has, the more flexible it will be. The more flexible wire is, the easier it is to tame and make it travel along these "roads".

This will cause large sections of your wiring to all begin running along the same path - think of these like your trunk line "highways". Sometimes this means wires intentionally take longer paths than necessary to keep these wires on dedicated "roads", like visible in this photo of FRC 973:

But this solution only deals with the power wires - you still need to deal with the signal/PWM/sensor wires. Keeping with the same city analogy, we need to treat these as a subway or monorail and route them on a different level from the cars on the main level.

While running wires underneath a control panel might not always be feasible (especially if it is your belly pan), one idea that works really well is to build pylons using a small (#8/32 or smaller)

Our team also wired the electronics board like elevated highways. We used standoff and P clamps. To save space, we actually screwed the standoffs on top of the Jaguar's mounting holes doubled as the screws securing them. The outside mounting holes hosted the "power" highway and the inner mounting holes hosted the "signal" highway.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Hey, I will be the first one to point out wiring as shown as being pretty cool but...
I am more for getting as much current to the motors as possible and that means short straight runs. Every sharp corner and common path adds inches to the wiring which translates to losses. Simply positioning the controllers near the PD on both sides minimizes the loss. Remember the series resistance is in both the red and the black wiring. One wire foot (1' of #10, 2' of #6, 6" of #12) will drop 0.1 volts at 100 amps. A two foot run is four wire feet.

[yash101]

I think it is best to have a very small electrical team that actually gets work done, because they can communicate much easier. We have two members, Ryan and Ben, who actually get work done while everyone else is messing around!

In short, keep the electrical team short and make sure that they are always working on something! Their ain't any end to improvement .

[drwisley]

In addition to the previous great posts, constrain the wires between components in the nice paths, with clean turns, prior to connecting on either end. Leave 3-5 inches of wire on each end. Once all the runs are complete between the components, then cut, strip, crimp and or connect. If you want beautiful wiring, you will waste tons of wire until you become proficient. I really like Art's post.

[rlowe61]

One last thing that hasn't been said, but possibly implied. Many times if you aren't building a prototype (second bot), if you want a clean wiring of your bot, you'll have to make the initial runs a bit long and messy, then go back and clean them up. Many times I've wired long messy runs, to test and get it working, only to go back and run the wires neatly and cut to length (new connector). You have to make sure if you plan on doing this, you include the extra time it will take to make these corrections/cleanings. Many teams when prototyping will work on the placement of the components on a bot. When building their compitition bot, already know where everything is going and build their electronics board away from the drivetrain and minipulators only to bring it in and make the final connections. (trim wires to length and connect)
It takes Time (lots of it) and Planning. Sometimes more time planning then actual time doing the wiring.
Like has been mentioned, practice with controller boards in the off season to get more time and experience.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

In the two pictures you provided, the robots are not completed, so we don't see all the sensor and control wires...only the main power wires. It's when you add the next few layers of stuff, that things tend to get messy.

1538 would disagree.

[Nemo]

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!

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

1538 would disagree.

Would disagree with what?

I'm talking about normal, messy wired robots....ours look great until we actually get enough wires on them to get them working, then they become a mess.

But I guess this thread is all about unrealistic robots, so it doesn't matter