Hi everyone! I’m new to the FIRST program and the Chief Delphi community. I’ve just been assigned to work on the circuitry. Does anyone have any good resources or tips? Anything would be appreciated. Thanks!
Code Orange has a bunch of good videos on how to strip and crimp wires. They also have some videos that relate to older components such as the Digital Side Car.
Where to start … Here are a few tips for startes:
- Label your wires
- Keep power & motor cables short
- Use proper gauge wires for rated circuits (consult FRC manual)
- Label your wires
- Use proper wire strippers when removing insulation so as not to remove wire strands
- twist wire strands before inserting them into the PDB cage clamp terminals (prevents whiskers trom touching other circuits)
- Did I mention to label your wires?
- Route wires in a logical fashion and tie them down with zip ties
- Don’t run power wires and PWM cables in one wire bundle
Greetings,
Check out this thread http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1365230
Trobobots wrote a big long document over everything you could possibly know, and the info is all extremely accurate. Good luck with everything!
Spec
Team 4063
Never power up a robot without checking all wiring changes. If at all possible, grab someone else and walk through all wiring changes with them. Especially pay attention to polarity!
Make sure that you have the correct termination tool for all of your electrical terminations. If at all possible, use ratcheting crimp tools as these tend to provide a more predictable and repeatable result.
I recommend twisting of all possible power wires - supply with return - to minimize radiated noise, though most don’t bother.
Wherever possible, I terminate bare wire ends in crimp ferrules; especially those that are inserted into Wago terminals. I get some disagreement on that approach, as well.
My recommendations, in that order! Best of luck
Never power up a robot without checking all wiring changes. If at all possible, grab someone else and walk through all wiring changes with them. Especially pay attention to polarity!
Make sure that you have the correct termination tool for all of your electrical terminations. If at all possible, use ratcheting crimp tools as these tend to provide a more predictable and repeatable result.
I recommend twisting of all possible power wires - supply with return - to minimize radiated noise, though most don’t bother.
Wherever possible, I terminate bare wire ends in crimp ferrules; especially those that are inserted into Wago terminals. I get some disagreement on that approach, as well.
My recommendations, in that order! Best of luck
Two more things – use a proper (ratcheting for larger than ~14ga) crimp tool, and label your wires!
Label All of your wires, at both ends.
Comprehensively document your electrical system with one or more drawings. You may want to consider using the free Altium license to do this since it includes a proper schematic drawing program. The same methodology can be used to comprehensively document your pneumatic system.
Also, label ALL of your wires, at both ends.
Diddo to the Altium designer. It is an industry standard in curcuit design and after getting familiar with it, it is quite the useful program. Will love using it this season. If you do want to try it out though go request your license for it now. It took them a few days to get back to me with mine.
Everyone’s advice is to label all your wires. I agree.
The real trick is how to do it? Therefore, my question is what are your techniques, part numbers, and suppliers to accomplish the wire labelling task both for power, signal and PWM cables?
We’ve used this or something equivalent last year when I was mentoring wiring, and had no complaints: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/STD-C/STD-C-ND/30738
Though really, the product really doesn’t matter - we’ve used everything from the 10-color label tapes to 10-digit number tapes to zip-ties with the built-in label area that you write on with a sharpie. The only labels we had which did NOT work were some cheap little sticky-tape numbers that didn’t wrap around the wires and always fell off - I don’t know the brand. For simple projects (not the competition 'bot), we have just used a single different color tiny zip tie at each end. When we use color (as we did last year), we’ll use the same color for the PWM cables as the motor cables - no one has yet managed to confuse three 20GA wires with a Dupont connector from two 12 GA wires with Anderson power poles. This way, we also label the motor, motor controller, and slot on the sidecar with the same color tape. If you decide to go to a second color on each wire (to expand beyond say, 10), do not try to use complementary pairs (e.g. both blue-red and red-blue) - this will cut you to 55 pairs plus 10 singles, but that should be enough!
Also, you can generate pretty decent wiring harness graphics on a budget just using power point or a similar drawing program. Develop a schematic image for each of your components (A black and two grey cylinders make a CIM, for example), and use the “connectors” line features as wires and hoses so you can move items around and the wires will follow. Of course, also color-tag the items on your diagram! At least once a week during build season, or every re-wire if more frequent, go through the wiring, comparing the actual wires, the wiring team’s diagrams, and the programmers source code constants to make sure that everything’s connected correctly. At the same time, make sure that everything’s connected securely!
We used the “Wire Marker” booklets from Home Depot. We used half of a strip on each end of a wire. This was long enough to go around the wire and stick back on itself, forming a “flag” with the text showing.
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Ideal-Wire-Marker-Booklets-10-Pack-44-102/100118882
While working as an intern at Panduit I helped develop and test heat shrink tubing to print on for labeling wires coming out of terminal blocks. If you can get access to one of these printers and heat shrink tubing it works beautifully and doesn’t get tangled like the “flags” from wrap around tags/labels. Obviously , I think Panduit printers are the way to go;) but a lot of other companies sell thermal transfer printers or other solutions to printing on heat shrink.
Here are some of the various labels that I have tested:
http://www.panduit.com/en/products-and-services/products/identification
I advocate the heat shrink though cause they are the easiest and nicest looking