Tips for new 'Head of Electronics'

[natejo99]

2016 was my first year as student electrical lead on my team. I learned that wire loom, zip ties, and adhesive zip tie blocks are your best friends for keeping wire organized. Labeling wires is also extremely important and will make system repairs and component replacements so much easier.

As for the size of an electrical team: last year our electrical team had about 7 members. 2 of them were mainly programmers, but helped out with electrical as well. I found that this is way too many people. Ideally, I'd say that an electrical team should consist of the student lead, as well as about 2-3 other dedicated electrical students. I found that there (generally) is only enough room for a maximum of 2 people to be working on the robot at a time, so the other members of the electrical team should have something else to work on (be that a side project, organizing your electrical space, etc.). Hope this helps!

[Tungrus]

1. Secure all wires
2. secure and insulate cables to battery
3. Check main breaker terminals before every match, tighten if necessary, and insulate them
4. Ring LEDS come with skinny white wires, replace them with 14 or 18 AWG wires. Skinny white wires easily get stripped resulting in shorts
5. Stress relieve soldered wires
6. Secure power cable (we used electrical tape), so it's firmly in place

[ASD20]

Originally Posted by Tungrus

3. Check main breaker terminals before every match, tighten if necessary, and insulate them

Don't just check the nuts on the breaker. Also check the crimps. We lost power a match this year because one of our main breaker crimps was loose.

[Munchskull]

1.Zip wire is your friend! Don'the be afraid to spend the extra money for it.
2. Anderson connectors are amazing but pull test every single one.
3. Heat shrink don't tape. Any where you endup taping is a place where you should have put heat shrink.
4. New PWM wires every year! Premade pwms should not be transferred from year to year. Either buy or make new wires.
5. Wire wrap is great, end of story, keeping wires in mesh wire wrap will let you group them by system and protect them from minor nicks and internal breakage.
6. Plan component placement. Your design team should work with you not only on what area electron is go, but the exact placement of them. That way the drill the holes and bring you the bolts!
7. Crimp or solder not both! You waste time if you crimp and solder. Crimping provides a cold weld-like bondage that is mechanically robust, by soldering it you bring it to ~200C and endurance stress relieving the joint which unfortunately does the initial crimp.

[ThaddeusMaximus]

1. Make sure you are as much of a part of mechanical design as your own department. Electronics are not the end goal- electronics enable good code to control good mechanical systems. Mechanicals oftentimes think things like "voltage drop isn't a big deal", "Backlash isn't an issue", "we can just strap a potentiometer on this", etc... they're oftentimes wrong. There's mechanical design aspects that should be influenced by electrical capabilities. You need to have input. It will save you time and headaches. Mechanical needs to know the possibilities out there and your limitations. (This also goes for code.)

2. Rail mechanical for moar electronics space. This has been beat to a pulp but yeah.

3. Work really closely with code too (are you noticing a trend here?). so many issues are caused because of incorrect hookups, unchecked hookups, etc.

4. Don't memorize the rules. Refer constantly to the book. Look over and make sure everything is code. There's no reason to cut corners.

Electronics is really middleware. You have to operate as such.