Does anyone where I can purchase extending pwm cables similar to the extending air hose that came in this year’s KOP. My team’s getting a little close to weight because of a new mechanism we want to add for The Championship and I know that in Philly we used some super heavy wire for a sensor and it weighted alot. If anyone can point me in the right direction it will be greatly appreciated.
Wow you must be on a SERIOUS weight loss plan to be going to thinner wire…
I usually get mine a the local Hobby Shop as they are used for rc stuff as well but here is some online places:
http://www.robotmarketplace.com/products/rc_cables_and_adapters.html
Well we arent sure how much the new piece will weigh and right about now we are about 119.5
Umm yeah we used about 24 feet-ish of 12 gauge wire wrapped in tape so my guess is that going to a normal pwm cable will save weight. I need something coiled though because a normal cable is a little fragile. Is there anywhere where I can buy coiled wire from and make my own?
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Just use a four conductor telephone handset cable, ignore the fourth cable, and splice on PWM bodies onto the ends.
If you have two sensors, you can share the Vcc and Ground between the two, and use the remaining two wires for the signal wires.
Either that, or use a bunch of the iGUS cable chain and run all your wires and/or pneumatic air lines through that.
I think I’ll give the telephone headset cord a try it’s gotta be lighter than what we have.
For long distances and multiple PWM cables, we use cat5e. I think this year we ended up running up 3 cat5e cables. We try not to share the ground and the power, even though we can, it’s hard to splice into the middle of a cat5e cable and have it work okay. =p
But yeah. That’s how we run PWM cables long distances. Not sure how it affects weight.
Then you must be using some really heavy wires, that telephone cable is surprisingly heavy - keep that in mind!
It depends on what kind of sensor you’re using, but you might be able to get away with wire-wrapping wire (24 AWG I think). Now that stuff is light. Can’t handle much current though, so be warned. We’ve used it on a PING module before. You really have to worry about it being in a spot where it could be broken too.
On 254 we make our own PWM cables, they help to clean up the wiring and especially make long runs such as the one from the rc to the flag holder much easier. This year we used crimps from Hansen Hobbies, http://www.hansenhobbies.com/, these crimps can also be obtained from such suppliers as Jameco. As for the wires themselves we used cat5 cable on the electronics board and used 24 gauge wire from McMaster for the long sensor runs. A simpler solution for the wire would be to just use the servo wire Hansen Hobbies sells, it is the same as the kit PWM cables. From what I have heard the economy wire works better, the deluxe wire is of a higher gauge and does not fit in the housings well.
I think the telephone cords are a good way to handle this. I caution teams that use CAT cable as this cable is made of solid copper conductors which break when you need them the most. Solid conductors are not meant for moving devices and require additional thought in strain relief and wire management.
Seconded! Our electrical team used CAT5e for wiring part of our operator interface. Poor strain relief lead to a broken 5V wire lead to our lift stuck at mid extension for an entire match and our robot stuck in one quadrant since we couldn’t clear the overpass.
We use stranded CAT 5 to avoid this.