How to wire unrealistically well?

[mikets]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Think of wires like cars. You can only drive your car along roads - if you take a shortcut through someone else's property they will get mad. In cites such as New York City, roads arranged in a square/rectangular grid pattern make it easy to navigate. To make your wiring look neat and easy to work on, we will follow this same virtual "road" grid pattern.

This means your wiring should only travel in straight orthogonal directions, and always make clean right angle corners*. To make corners that look good, use a very high strand count wire - in general the more strands a wire has, the more flexible it will be. The more flexible wire is, the easier it is to tame and make it travel along these "roads".

This will cause large sections of your wiring to all begin running along the same path - think of these like your trunk line "highways". Sometimes this means wires intentionally take longer paths than necessary to keep these wires on dedicated "roads", like visible in this photo of FRC 973:

But this solution only deals with the power wires - you still need to deal with the signal/PWM/sensor wires. Keeping with the same city analogy, we need to treat these as a subway or monorail and route them on a different level from the cars on the main level.

While running wires underneath a control panel might not always be feasible (especially if it is your belly pan), one idea that works really well is to build pylons using a small (#8/32 or smaller)

Our team also wired the electronics board like elevated highways. We used standoff and P clamps. To save space, we actually screwed the standoffs on top of the Jaguar's mounting holes doubled as the screws securing them. The outside mounting holes hosted the "power" highway and the inner mounting holes hosted the "signal" highway.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Hey, I will be the first one to point out wiring as shown as being pretty cool but...
I am more for getting as much current to the motors as possible and that means short straight runs. Every sharp corner and common path adds inches to the wiring which translates to losses. Simply positioning the controllers near the PD on both sides minimizes the loss. Remember the series resistance is in both the red and the black wiring. One wire foot (1' of #10, 2' of #6, 6" of #12) will drop 0.1 volts at 100 amps. A two foot run is four wire feet.

[yash101]

I think it is best to have a very small electrical team that actually gets work done, because they can communicate much easier. We have two members, Ryan and Ben, who actually get work done while everyone else is messing around!

In short, keep the electrical team short and make sure that they are always working on something! Their ain't any end to improvement .

[drwisley]

In addition to the previous great posts, constrain the wires between components in the nice paths, with clean turns, prior to connecting on either end. Leave 3-5 inches of wire on each end. Once all the runs are complete between the components, then cut, strip, crimp and or connect. If you want beautiful wiring, you will waste tons of wire until you become proficient. I really like Art's post.

[rlowe61]

One last thing that hasn't been said, but possibly implied. Many times if you aren't building a prototype (second bot), if you want a clean wiring of your bot, you'll have to make the initial runs a bit long and messy, then go back and clean them up. Many times I've wired long messy runs, to test and get it working, only to go back and run the wires neatly and cut to length (new connector). You have to make sure if you plan on doing this, you include the extra time it will take to make these corrections/cleanings. Many teams when prototyping will work on the placement of the components on a bot. When building their compitition bot, already know where everything is going and build their electronics board away from the drivetrain and minipulators only to bring it in and make the final connections. (trim wires to length and connect)
It takes Time (lots of it) and Planning. Sometimes more time planning then actual time doing the wiring.
Like has been mentioned, practice with controller boards in the off season to get more time and experience.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

In the two pictures you provided, the robots are not completed, so we don't see all the sensor and control wires...only the main power wires. It's when you add the next few layers of stuff, that things tend to get messy.

1538 would disagree.

[Nemo]

I think a big piece of clean wiring is having enough space for the components. The example pictures are from 254, 968, 973, and 1538: all West Coast Drive teams. WCD has its outer rails as far as possible to the outside, so the middle area for electronics is as big as it can be. It's also possible to get that much space using sheet aluminum chassis. Making wiring look that clean with a C-Base chassis is much more difficult because there's way less space between the rails. We've used C-base in the past three years, and we've had to build a second level for electronics in each case. Having two levels adds some additional challenges for getting the wiring to be organized and nice looking. That was especially true last year with the reduced maximum robot perimeter; the perimeter got smaller, but the power board / CIM motors / cRio / battery / etc still took up the same amount of space on the drive base. Doesn't leave much room for motor controllers.

I just looked up some pictures of our wiring - wow, wires are running in every direction. I'll have to make sure our wiring people read Art's advice before we let them wire anything this year. I can think of a couple of egregiously long wires/cables in particular that irritated the crap of me last year, and people ignored me when I told them to fix it... this year those are getting torn out overnight. Thanks for the pro tip, CD!

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

1538 would disagree.

Would disagree with what?

I'm talking about normal, messy wired robots....ours look great until we actually get enough wires on them to get them working, then they become a mess.

But I guess this thread is all about unrealistic robots, so it doesn't matter

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

keep these wires on dedicated "roads", like visible in this photo of FRC 973:

Also carefully notice that there is a small "service loop" of wire at the connection (particularly at the PDB) that gives a little slack to allow the wire to be disconnected abd reconnected if necessary. Don't leave wiring so tight it can't be moved.

Originally Posted by yash101

I think it is best to have a very small electrical team that actually gets work done, because they can communicate much easier. We have two members, Ryan and Ben, who actually get work done while everyone else is messing around!

In short, keep the electrical team short and make sure that they are always working on something! Their ain't any end to improvement .

OK, we have one kid who is over 6 feet tall - should we get rid of him? He's pretty good at it and we'd hate to lose him...

[Foster]

So these pictures of nicely routed wires are missing a key item.

Cable labels. It's nice for you that wire a robot once and then never need to remove components, unfasten wires, etc.

Cable labels can save the day! I've used the lables that roll around the cable, they come 0-9 and A-Z.

In a more perfect world cables get double labled

]] this end / the other end ------------------------- the othe end / this end [[

(Art has sketching skills, I don't )

This allows you to take the device off and know where the now dangling end goes, or lets you do a traceback through that nice neat bundle of ziptied cables go.

[RKazmer]

Originally Posted by Foster

Cable labels. It's nice for you that wire a robot once and then never need to remove components, unfasten wires, etc.

Cable labels can save the day! I've used the lables that roll around the cable, they come 0-9 and A-Z.

This is a link to the cloth labels 2363 uses. They are easier to wrap around the wire and stay unlike labels from a label maker(they fall off in a day).

http://www.mcmaster.com/#standard-wire-labels/=sl7zlz

We use the wrap-around wire markers with NEMA colors (blank) and then write the number or voltage needed for the wire.

Also, one of the keys to good wiring is the right material to mount the electronics on. The other pictures show an aluminum bellypan with large spaces in it for ease of using zipties. We ended up using a perforated polycarbonate from AndyMark.

http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-0836.htm

And of course no wiring job is complete without 1000+ zipties.

[yash101]

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

Also carefully notice that there is a small "service loop" of wire at the connection (particularly at the PDB) that gives a little slack to allow the wire to be disconnected abd reconnected if necessary. Don't leave wiring so tight it can't be moved.
OK, we have one kid who is over 6 feet tall - should we get rid of him? He's pretty good at it and we'd hate to lose him...

No. What I'm saying is to keep the team short. Don't get rid of anyone! As long as everyone can effectively communicate with each other, the team is the right size!

[m1506m]

Something like this,
Attachment 15574
This was from our summer build. It's just a matter of routing the wires neatly, and we don't like crimp connections, prefer to solder instead.

[Luke Harma]

Zip tie and label your wires.

[iKiel2012]

One thing that my team, 1073, has had problems with in the past is that the electrical portion of the robot isn't in mind when the mechanical aspects of it are being designed. Make sure both of those groups can figure out a design that works for both...