Our team is using the 971 Spartan Board, however I’ve tried to look to see if there’s some sort of CAD/other thing that we could buy as a casing for it. Some of the contact pins bent 
as well as some of the components became dislodged from the board. Do any other teams using the Spartan Board have this problem? If so, do any of you guys have a possible solution to this? Thanks!
Bummer!
There’s not anything commercially available that I know of.
In the past, teams have 3d-printed a cover. The team that I know did this in the past says they need to do a revision before it makes sense to share the model. If others have a model to share, that would be awesome.
I don’t have a Spartan Board to use as reference, but if someone points me towards accurate CAD of one, I’d be glad to design a printable case for it.
Why are the pins being bent and why are the components becoming dislodged from your Spartan Board? Did something something strike the board? Are you subjecting the board to extreme shock? What components are becoming dislodged? The connectors? L1 and/or L3? Are connector pins being bent because the cable plugged into it was ripped out of it? Do you have photos of the damaged board and the installation that you can share?
Depending on the root cause of this damage, a 3-D printed cover might not be the best (or an adequate) solution.
Bummer!
There’s not anything commercially available that I know of.
In the past, teams have 3d-printed a cover. The team that I know did this in the past says they need to do a revision before it makes sense to share the model. If others have a model to share, that would be awesome.
Oh no! That’s a shame. We could probably figure out something for that.
Why are the pins being bent and why are the components becoming dislodged from your Spartan Board? Did something something strike the board? Are you subjecting the board to extreme shock? What components are becoming dislodged? The connectors? L1 and/or L3? Are connector pins being bent because the cable plugged into it was ripped out of it? Do you have photos of the damaged board and the installation that you can share?
Depending on the root cause of this damage, a 3-D printed cover might not be the best (or an adequate) solution.
To answer this, I’m not a very great help, since the only way that the pins would get bent (other than human error) would possibly be through wear and tear of competition. The component that was dislodged is in photo 1 (not quite sure how that happened, nor what component that even is), as well as pin damage in photos 2 & 3. I cannot share the installation unfortunately (which would be a great help 
) but we just took apart the robot that the Spartan Board was on. This might have been the cause of it, but some of the damage was present far before that. I just thought of something to protect it immediately when I saw the damage since it will keep dust off of the board, as well as (MAYBE) protecting the components and the wires plugged in to it.
PHOTOS:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dkBegEKAxzjtH-UV9Fvh6W6UpsL_pzL9
We bend a thicker polycarb piece over the spartan board that velcros on the side, easy and works well 
I think you are pointing to the black square box with the circular part in the middle is lifted off the board on one side. It has the text “150” in the middle of the top and “L3” on the circuit board next to it.
My guess is that something large and moderately heavy struck the board. All the pins are bent in the same direction and L3 is also pushed in that same direction.
Does the board still work? My guess is that part of might not work anymore. If it does not work, WCP might be able to tell you if it can be repaired or not. Even if it does work or is repaired, I would not trust it for use in a competition robot.
It is not clear if you are suspecting that some of the damage occurred in the disassembly process. Say someone ripped the Spartan Board out of the RoboRio and threw it into a box as target practice. If this is the case, it might be an opportunity for your team to have some training regarding how electronics components should be treated.
I would strongly suggest that you always use a polycarbonate shield over all of your electronics, like Pauline suggested. It should be mounted to a sturdy part of the frame that can take impact forces. You would probably want to have some space between the highest point on the board(s) and the bottom of the shield to allow room for the cables that would be plugged into the connectors. Ensure that when forces are applied to the shield, it does not deflect enough to touch any of the electronic components or the cables plugged into them.
A 3-D printed cover that is “form-fitting” would not likely provide much protection from the sort of impacts that this board saw but could be helpful for keeping small pieces of (conductive) debris off the board.
On a separate note, in the past the Spartan boards did not have conformal coating on exposed solder joints, which led to a ton of issues for us in 2016. This year we inspected and fixed any joints that didn’t flow properly as well as coated the exposed ones and we had zero issues.
Did you have conductive debris causing short circuits?
In the past we had boards we deemed “dead”, which could have been the result of debris or failed solder joints.
How did you determine that the solder joints had failed?
We couldn’t conclusively prove our problems were solely failed solder joints, so we re-flowed joints that seemed to be off as well as applied the coating. (But to answer your question, we tried to continuity test between leads/joints that we believed to be connected, as well as examined the joints under a stereo microscope)
Just taking a look at the images that Guy997 posted, we can see a few joints that seem susceptible to breakage. I attached Guy997’s picture with a few of these circled on the MXP connector joints.
Wow! I have to agree with you now. It looks like they used a proper reflow process to solder the surface mount parts and hand soldered the through hole connectors. I’m not a trained IPC Inspector but it is a safe bet that the solder joints for many of the connectors would not pass even the least stringent inspection criteria. A veritable Rogues Gallery of examples of bad solder joints; too little solder, too much solder, insufficient wetting, uneven solder distribution,…
In the one on the left that you circled, it looks like the solder did not go into the hole in the board. Even if you got a good continuity reading, it might go open (possibly intermittently for maximum frustration) when that pin is inserted into a receptacle or some other force is applied to it.
Have you or the OP notified WCP of this? There are now two of you with boards with unacceptable soldering. Any board assembly subcontractor I have used for work would get the whole batch of boards returned to them immediately if the QC Department found even a few examples like this.
Now that I think of it, we MIGHT not have covered the Spartan board in the past (2016) with polycarb which may have caused some of the wear, however, the L3 issue seems relatively new.
Does the board still work? My guess is that part of might not work anymore. If it does not work, WCP might be able to tell you if it can be repaired or not. Even if it does work or is repaired, I would not trust it for use in a competition robot.
To answer that question, I’m not quite sure actually. I was planning on running some tests tomorrow on that. I wouldn’t trust it either for competition bots, so that’s staying on offseason/practice bots only.
It is not clear if you are suspecting that some of the damage occurred in the disassembly process. Say someone ripped the Spartan Board out of the RoboRio and threw it into a box as target practice. If this is the case, it might be an opportunity for your team to have some training regarding how electronics components should be treated.
This is more just that I’m not ruling out the idea that someone might have yanked out some wires during the disassembly process. Regarding that, during training, I will definitely talk about how electronic components should be treated.
On a separate note, in the past the Spartan boards did not have conformal coating on exposed solder joints, which led to a ton of issues for us in 2016. This year we inspected and fixed any joints that didn’t flow properly as well as coated the exposed ones and we had zero issues.
Now, this is a whole new issue. I’ll take a look at this tomorrow to see if any other joints are like this. Was this only an issue on when you ordered boards in 2016? We just ordered 2 more, so just making sure that the problem may have been fixed.
Have you or the OP notified WCP of this?
This is actually my first time seeing this. I’ll definitely notify them on this.
Thank you guys for your help!
You just posted as I was updating my last post.
Yanking out wires would not rip L3 off the board. Something hit it or the board hit something. It could also be poor storage. Someone could have removed it and carefully put it into a storage bin. Then something big was thrown in on top. Boards like this should be stored in an anti-static bag then put in a bin or box with other boards and no other large, heavy objects.
Look at the solder joints for the white connectors on the bottom side of the board.
Sam,
If you have dead boards, please send them back to us to take a look at.
We had a local business solder the black headers this year locally, so the boards should be quite a bit better. All the white headers/SMD components are done at the factory level.
We’ve had a few pins get bent on our offseason bot due to stuff falling on it and just made a plastic cover that goes over it. Also our roborio for our offseason bot is simply just gross, its covered in ball shavings… Ooooops.
-RC
We let RC know, and they were great enough to take back some of the boards and provide replacements. I’m personally more worried about the conformal coating; the amount of robot “residue” on our roborio right now is crazy. If we didn’t coat the gyro, I’m sure it would have shorted by now (I’ll take pictures next time I’m with the bot).
That’s great customer service!
The ball shavings are probably not conductive so should not cause shorts but if some smaller particles get into the sockets, it could cause poor or intermittent connections. Not quite as bad as a short but still not good.
It might be worth considering installing the Roborio, PDP, VRM and PCM on vertical surfaces so they don’t naturally accumulate debris.