Exercise for the Robots' Electronic for not to ruin the Controlers:)

[keen101]

If possible try and get access to an older robot from previous years. That will help you get ideas.


Other than that the best advice i can give you is... make sure you have an accessible design. keep the RC, battery and PWM's accessible. There is nothing that slows down a team more than having to dig through wires and around gearboxes to try and fix a problem. I learned that the hard way.

[lukevanoort]

Originally Posted by keen101

Other than that the best advice i can give you is... make sure you have an accessible design. keep the RC, battery and PWM's accessible. There is nothing that slows down a team more than having to dig through wires and around gearboxes to try and fix a problem. I learned that the hard way.

Yep, that is definitely key. Our electrical setup last year was crammed into a really small space (our turret took up almost half of the robot) and it really hurt us. Our first qualifier at Palmetto we couldn't even take to the field because the common wire from the battery fell out of the distro block in queuing, and it was too difficult to reach to be fixable in the short amount of time we had. The following match we couldn't score because, in the process of fixing the first problem, we had accidentally unplugged the solenoid that controlled our gripper actuator. Don't be like us and learn the hard way; make accessible electronics.

[EricVanWyk]

Practice crimping your wires. Crimp a wire, tug on its connector a few times. Repeat until you can reliably get it to stick.

Bad crimps have a high "badness caused" to "difficulty to fix" ratio, so it is a good place to invest a little time.