My team is working on attaching our electrical board to our robot. We are curious if there is a way of mounting the board so that the board can be easily dismounted for repair, without having to remove lots of screws. Something that wouldn’t be very time consuming to remove. So far, our plan is to have vertical board with a poly carbonate sheet on the front of it to protect the electronics. Thanks for your time!
Having the board be removable is nice for assembly, but once it goes on the robot you probably aren’t taking it off very often. I usually try to prioritize short wires and easy maintenance of single components over removability of the whole board.
I personally would recommend not doing this, due to the fact that under most circumstances you wouldn’t want to remove the whole thing at once, but rather one part to repair/replace.
But if you do want to, I would personally recommend wiring all your motor wires, and the andersons at the end to a central area where you can remove them, then just put all the electronics on a polycarb panel that is velcroed onto the robot. I would recommend using a clinko on each corner (or some other piece to hold it in place), just in case the velcro were to fail to hold the polycarb in place. I would also recommend mounting to either the bellypan of the robot, or the side of your robot.
Good luck! Hope this helps a little!
Our electronics panel is made from the perforated polycarb. The electrical components are held on with small and medium width zipties. The side panels are 1/8" polycarb sheet. The electronics panel is attached to the side panels with a few medium width zipties. Connections between the motor controllers and motors all have Anderson connectors.
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I think a removable electrical board mount is certainly a good thing to try. It makes life easier when you’re wanting to work on more than one thing at once, or even if you just want to have your electrical board in a protected place but not have to squeeze to work on it. Additionally, you can remove it for when you have to drill or work on your superstructure so you don’t ruin the $1500 or so of components on it. We are using a wooden board held on by a few bolts with velcro as a vibration dampener, and it seems fairly solid.
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Let us know if you need help, we have built a few this season. See this thread:
Let us know, good luck this year Technocrats!
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I might have the electrical team give you a call tomorrow. We have one idea that we think will work, but would love to hear about yours.
What is a clinko? We’ve never heard of such thing and can’t find one via Google search.
We’ve found it valuable to remove it to allow parallel work between the electrical and mechanical teams. It also allows easier access to other parts of the robot for maintenance. Maybe as we continue to increase the reliability of our electronics setup we’ll have less need for it. It also really nice for preventing metal shavings from showering your electronics. We’ve also seen a team drill into a roborio before, we’re trying hard to not do that.
Completely understandable. Depending on how your team operates, it might make sense. In my experience though, removable electronics panel means either many connectors or unplugging wires. Both of those options generally introduce more points of failure, either with a connector failing or a wire being misplaced.
If you are able to assemble the electronics panel off the robot, it should only take an hour or two to permanently install it and then let mechanical get back to work. Then you just need to replace single components instead of taking the whole board off. If you can fit the board somewhere vertically, it’s easy to protect from metal shavings and accidental drilling.
If you guys have 80/20, what you do is you make plates to hold specific modules circuits or controllers, for example let’s say plate one has things like the pcp, pcm and Roborio. You can use a piece of metal to go on the back to act as a backstop of the 80/20, slide your electrical plate in the trays that are on the 80/20 like it is a drawer and then you take a screw long enough to go through all of your electrical plates that are on a ladder of 80/20 and you tighten it just enough to lock the plates in place, if this sounds complicated here’s a simplified way of saying that, think of a filing cabinet or better yet a toolbox with slides, use the 80/20 as slides. Put as much electrical as you can on each plate and basically make the different drawers on top of each other but use a back plate to stop the drawers from sliding though
All it takes is one screw and some male/female connectors to remove
I like to post this photo of an eboard we used last year. The lesson we learned that year was not to spend so much time on making a functional “removable eboard” because unforeseen changes can alter the overall functionality.
Good luck and make the most of it!
You will find it easier if you search Cleco (the brand name). But those are temporary fasteners for assembling sheet metal and welding, very much not a high strength or rigid attachment.
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Last year we designed an electrical grid with the intention of it being easily removable. The grid was attached to the 2 struts which supported our elevator using zipties and it was protected by a polycarb cover. Our electrical grid was easily removable as nothing was bolted, however, we never took it off of the robot during the season. We found everything to be easily accessible and any troubleshooting could be done quickly.
Hope this helps!
Apologies. I misspelled it. The correct spelling is Cleco, and it is a brand of temporary fasteners, but definitely helpful for fast removal