Rules Question

[MrRoboSteve]

You want these easily visible to someone standing outside the robot:

roboRIO lights
radio lights

Why? If you're having connectivity problems, they provide useful information to the field staff to help your robot get connected. They will generally not touch your robot as part of the troubleshooting process. During practice matches, there's more time to call your drive team out to the field to remove covers, etc, to do troubleshooting. Not so much on Saturday morning, particularly if matches are running behind.

It helps your team troubleshoot if the other active components of the control system (PDP, PCM, VRM, motor controllers) are visible. It's OK to have them under an easily-removed cover (meaning tool free removal). Don't bury them in locations that require disassembly of the robot.

This is probably a good place to remind teams of preferred radio locations:

. higher is better than lower
. don't mount it under a metal plate

[221Sarahborg]

We used a form of a "two layer" electrical panel for Aerial Assist. Since the most of our inner area of our robot was reserved for the ball/shooter, the bottom of our board was also our skid plate/the bottom plate of our bot. It was made of Alumalite, which is what we've used since. It requires an extra step during inspection to make sure no extra power/current goes through it but it's good for weight.

We had a plexiglass cover on top of it since the shooter would rest on top of it. For easy access it actually had two pins that would go through the board and into our PVC chassis. You can kind of see it in this photo. It was quick access if we needed it and it didn't include the radio, since that was higher up as you can maybe see.

We've done similar things since, last year had a vertical panel with a clear hinge panel over it and this year we plan on doing the same but just for the PDP and roboRIO since they also seem to be sitting under our shooter on our skid plate bottom board.