Anyone have part numbers for the male/female CAN connectors coming off of Victor/Talon motor controllers or know what these are called? Thanks!
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Victors and talons have only green and yellow CAN wires, not connectors. Can you be more specific?
The CAN bus wires have small, black plastic connectors at the end that contain a green and a yellow wire. These
What I think your looking for is the dupont connectors. I noticed they came with PWM/Servo ends crimped on to them. M on one cable and F on the other to make it easier to wire them together.
I think you want this:
I would not use those for connecting the CAN bus. They will come apart. These are made for this type of connection, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IMWCSWA/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07__o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Yes those would work better, I am just relaying what they did with the motor controllers this year. It came with a retaining clip to keep them from coming apart. Looks like this:
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To add to this:
Inventables has a $100 voucher this year and has connector, crimp tools, heat shrink.
https://www.inventables.com/categories/electrical/connectors
This is what you are looking for I think.
But look around they have a lot of stuff.
The generic name for these connectors is 0.1" wire-to-wire or wire-to-board connectors.
If you just want to just secure the connectors that come crimped on the Victor SPX CAN wires, use the retaining clips pointed out by pugsly14. There should have been some in your kit of parts.
If you want to replace the housings with locking housings, you will need to cut off the existing connectors, crimp pins or sockets onto the wires, and slide the pins/sockets into an appropriate locking housing. Vinh_pham_4587’s post in CAN Connector or Micro Fit Molex Connectors pretty much describes what we use, except that for CAN connections we use 2-pin housings (https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/0701070001/WM2533-ND and https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/50-57-9402/WM2900-ND) rather than the 3-pin housings linked by Vinh_pham. Note that the “DuPont style” pins and sockets already crimped on your Victor SPX are not compatible with these Molex SL housings, so you really do need to crimp on Molex SL pins/sockets if you want to use the Molex SL housings.
If you haven’t used it already, there’s a $50 voucher from Digi-Key available in the virtual kit of parts.
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Maybe you mean this
Victor SPX User’s Guide.pdf (2.8 MB)
You can use both wires as CAN/PWM but only one at time
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I hadn’t noticed that those appear to be 3-pin connectors with the center slot unused. Thanks! I’ll have to look closer tomorrow at the actual connectors.
I used a pwm cable to connect both sides of the CAN bus.
Cut a PWM cable in the middle, one part is connected to RoboRIO CAN, and the other to PDP CAN.
Just chain the Victor in/out and place the clip carefully
Those would work great I think. I was hoping to find connectors that would fit the current hardware as it’s just more work to redo 16 perfectly good connections. We have the retaining clips. DuPont style connector was the word I needed, I think. Maybe these?
Yes, that would work, but then you start mixing wiring colors and things get messy.
As a follow up, we have been using the locking connectors from digikey, but I was wondering if you all thought it was with it to use gold plated pins? Digikey sells some, but I do not have the part number right now.
Edit, we have also learned there are essentially two types of these pin/housing assemblies, and 1 is not compatible with the other.
1 type has a little metal spring on the pin that locks into the hole on the housing. This is the type the self locking housings use at digikey.
The other has a small pin on the housing that locks into place in the pin. This is the type that came with most of the kits that started us off. I think we got them from andymark, but not certain.
True, but on the other hand, if you do it well once, then it’s done forever, at least as long as the R15D exemption continues to exist.
Looking back at your original post, I see that you weren’t actually looking for locking connectors. (Perhaps I thought you had asked for this because I saw the retaining clip pack pugsly14 pointed out.) In any case, since you’re not looking for locking connectors, this kit would get the job done, though it has a bunch of housings you probably won’t ever use. I’m not sure if there’s a kit with only 1x3 housings, male pins, and female sockets, which would be ideal. Also, if you don’t have a crimper for these sorts of connectors, you will either need to buy a kit with a crimper, or buy the crimper separately.
For FRC applications, in a word, no. The gold plated pins are rated to maintain their original resistance plus <10 milliohms for 1000 mating cycles (pins) or 50 mating cycles (sockets), while the tin plated pins/sockets are only rated to maintain their original resistance plus <10 milliohms for 25 mating cycles.
That said, in my experience, the tin plated connectors continue to perform acceptably far beyond their rated 25 mating cycles.
In a perfect world, perhaps we’d keep both tin and gold plated elements on hand, and use the gold for things we use season after season (e.g., CAN wires permanently affixed to motor controllers), and tin for cables we build for single season use and for crimping practice.
Indeed! The pins and sockets are made to insert into a specific housing, you cannot mix and match. (Though you can plug together two assembled connectors of opposing types.)
In my experience, the Molex SL (“DigiKey style”) connectors are “professional grade” while the “DuPont style” (I’ve seen these principally at Amazon, but just looked and they are available at AndyMark as well) are “hobbyist grade.” I find the Molex version to be easier to assemble, better at keeping the pins aligned without a lot of wiggle, and far less likely to have the pins/sockets back out of the housing. Combined with Molex’s locking, polarized housings, and the shrouded housings to protect the pins on the male side, standardizing on the Molex version is a pretty easy decision.
Edit: I was just thinking - the one tough part about the Molex connectors is that there’s no “starter kit” available… I will do some thinking this evening and see if I can come up with a good starter kit as a shared Digi-Key shopping cart.
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There is a lot of wonderful info on parts and tools in Spectrum’s electrical guide.
http://blog.spectrum3847.org/2018/01/spectrum-2018-resource-collection.html
However,
I have not been able to find single pin molex connectors. I can find the Dupont version, but not the molex. There are times when these would be useful. Does anyone have a part number, or know if they exist?
We use latching connections for our CAN bus. Ordering in large quantities helps bring the cost down. These are also cheaper per unit than digikey.
http://www.hansenhobbies.com/products/connectors/pt1inlpconnectors/pt1in_lp_1x2/
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The main reason Jersey Voltage uses 3 pin is so that we can also use it on PWM connections. Thus having a bigger bulk order of the same part. Its simply a preference.