Wiring in general help

[Mark McLeod]

Let me emphasize an aspect of electronics placement that 1726 does very well.

Make every status light easily visible from some distance away from the robot!

Both you and field personnel can instantly tell what's gone wrong on a robot by being able to effortlessly see what the status lights are there to tell you.

I can't count the number of trivial problems that have killed robots and were harder to diagnose than they had to be just because the simple status lights were buried in the bowels of the robot.

P.S.
Almost as bad is quickly diagnosing a problem, only to have the drive team unable to reach the malfunctioning part to fix it before a match has to start.
Don't bolt covers on or require the disassembly of the robot just to be able to plug a camera back in and stop the robot code from crashing due to an unhandled exception.

[MrForbes]

Keep the FTA happy...he is here to help you!

[Ben Martin]

We usually wire as we're building and fabricating the rest of the robot--i.e. as soon as the chassis is built, it gets wired immediately. This helps testing get done quicker. Components are mixed in wherever there is space, and sensors are designed in during the CAD process.

To help keep it clean, we run some wire in tube structure, use a variety of colors for both labels and wires, and keep it retained with zip ties and wire sheaths.

For us, there is no dedicated electrical team--wiring is done by basically everybody. The wire map is pretty clear and consistent from year-to-year, so it's usually a "just get it done" task as opposed to something that is incredibly planned.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Make every status light easily visible from some distance away from the robot!

YES, YES, YES! Hidden status lights are the surest clues to poor wiring design. Hidden wires are about a half step behind - make your wires are easily visible and traceable.

[davidaly46]

148 design philosophy always centers on function, but form is not too far behind. From my years on pit crew and build team, here are some handy things i would recommend:

- NEVER make a wiring decision that could compromise the function of the system just to make it look a little better.

- Label.....label...label..label. LABEL!

- Use your time spent prototyping to get a feel for how your electrical system will come together, prototyping helps in more ways than just mechanical.

- Building a flexible system should be a high priority. Making extremely long runs through mechanical systems that have the potential to be replaced often, or even worse are designed to be removable, will make changes to the robot even harder. Liberal but efficient use of push and ring terminals will make these situations almost a breeze (if such a thing exists in FRC).

- Having a dedicated electrical team, or "sparkies" as they are referred to on 148, can be HUGELY beneficial. One or two mentors and a handful of students focusing on electrical/pneumatic systems will do wonders for your build and competition season.

- Have a dedicated section of your pit or workshop for housing electrical components and tools. This will help streamline your design and maintenance of the electrical systems.

- Using diagrams early in the build process, in my experience, tends to become rather useless. Electrical and pneumatic systems need to be dynamic in nature in order for mechanical systems, which determine much of your robot's performance, to be enhanced or changed at a moments notice. A better use of a diagram, or EE CAD file, would be to have one in your pit in order for students to become familiarized with the electrical system as the competition season progresses or for older robots whose systems wont change and just need to be maintained.

- Always carry zip-ties of a some form/shape/size in your pit as they are infinitely useful, and we have blown through hundreds at a single event. Luckily they are extremely inexpensive.

These are just a few of the big points i would tell a team looking to improve their electrical systems. I hope you think they are useful!

[GreyingJay]

If you can, plan the layout of your electronics while you're planning the rest of the robot. It's easier to wire neatly if you're able to put the components in a nice row on a single plane, with a space in between to channel the wires, as opposed to cramming each component wherever it will fit.

We also kept a consistent naming/numbering convention and labelled all the wires accordingly. Our robot has four drivetrain motors and two intake/mechanism motors. When looking at the robot from a top view we declared that the motors would be numbered in order from top to bottom, left to right. 1-2-3, 4-5-6. Left side: intake motor is 1, forward drive motor is 2, rear drive motor is 3. Right side: intake motor is 4, then drive motors 5 and 6. We stuck with this convention for everything. The PWM ports for these motors are 1,2,3, and 4,5,6. The encoders for the drive motors are on DIO's 2 and 3, and 5 and 6. On the PDP, they're wired in that same order on the left and right side 40A channels. Very predictable.

Making time for good wiring is something you need to enforce if you want it to happen. Even I was pushing for "let's just get it done" as we approached crunch time. The electrical mentor insisted that we do it right. We did, and the wiring (a) looks amazing, (b) is easy to figure out and troubleshoot, and (c) never once failed us during two rigorous regionals.