"Black Box" Electrical Board

[Al Skierkiewicz]

My advice to teams always starts with a discussion of wire losses for high current loads. If you want high performance from your robot, my suggestion is to place the PDP near the center of all of your electrical loads. This make the wire runs short and reduces wire loss to a minimum. Add you motor controllers in a like fashion centered around the PDP. Follow that with my advice that adding connectors also raises the chance of a failure and loss. Keep connectors at a minimum and you will be much happier with the robot. Please keep in mind that the #6 wiring from battery to PDP carries all of your robot current. Keep this run short, direct and neat. Even #6 carries loss. If you are running 4-6 drive motors, you are passing 500 amps through this circuit. At typical lengths, 500 amps will drop at least 1/2 volt before the PDP.