Velcro

[Foster]

And you should be!!

It's taken some time to get to the point where we can do this. Prior year robots were kind of messy. Four years ago the electrical mentor, Frank, built some electrical boards that are things of beauty. Components on one side, wiring on the other. The designs have stuck but rather than one board we now move Jags as close to the motors as possible. This means a number of electrical sub-panels than are fed from the central power distribution board. We feed all the sub-panels with #10 wire. Motors are close to their Jags and we use their wires without extending it. Low voltage loss, good traceability, lots of labels and things are easy to work on.

Our Tuffak battery box is shown below. It wraps around the battery and holds it in place in case the robot turns turtle. The battery is held side to side between two frame rails. So it's not going anywhere in a crash, but it comes out quickly for fast pit stops.



The real box is clear, it's shown in blue here to make it easy to see. The side wings are how the box mounts to the frame

We will put a safety strap around the battery, but in upside down testing the box alone works well.

Our heavy use of Tuffak allows us to "see through" the robot and see all the parts, it makes troubleshooting easy. We expect to make our welded frame out of transparent aluminum for the 2011 season (cost was a factor this year)

((Posting karma: The message at the top is "You trip my breaker." ))