I was wondering how other teams managed the long 50-100ftish wires for use on the practice field and in the pits. For us it is just a long tether with no real management except occasionally being wrapped around a clipboard. I’m pretty sure that 254 uses this spool, which looks great but is very pricey. How do your teams manage them?
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We use a leftover pla spool from the 3d printer. It was free and it fits in our driver station briefcase.
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For your tethering cable, you best/easiest bet it to get flat cable. Most of them are stranded, and thus radically more durable than solid core (shudder).
This is the bee’s knees for tethering: Retractable Network Cable… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LW2YNJ4?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
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When you’re using it so you take the cable off the spool or do you keep it on?
That one looks great, thanks!
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We’ve been using it for 3-4 years now. I cracked it open and lubed it; worth doing 
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This is how cables are murdered. Even just elbow-hand coiling is better.
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3468 Has also used this product for the last 3 seasons or so. Has worked out great!
Only real downside is that there is no slipring on the side-input so you need to unspool however much you’ll need before you connect to it.
Armabot: “Allow me to introduce myself”
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If you have a long cable, and don’t want to spend money on a reel, you can learn to coil it properly. I’ve used this technique for underwater ROV cables, it helps a lot to avoid tangles:
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I use this technique for all of my long cables and it works great, definitely a capable alternative to using a reel.
The over-under method should be a required skill for graduating high school.
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If only high schools still cared about teaching practical skills. But anyway, I should get off CD and go back to taking derivatives of absolutely ridiculous functions, right?
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Not child needs two years of history.
Not every child needs algebra.
I’m tired of fitting all the square pegs in round holes.
The United States has this wierd preoccupation that every kid should go to college. That every kid should learn to code. That trades like carpentry, machining, and plumbing are somehow not worthy of our children.
We graduate children capable of changing the password on their iPhone, but not changing the tire on their car.
/rant
Bought quads to play with. Kids were not allowed to ride until they passed their safety courses and did the initial maintenance themselves, including trans oil and trans filter changes.
@connor.worley saw your question and realized my rant was incoherent so I fixed it.
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I have mixed feelings about using procedural abilities as benchmarks. Changing a tire or over/under winding can be taught in a 5 minute YouTube video like that one posted; I didn’t graduate high school knowing how to change a tire but had no issue doing it a couple weeks ago for that exact reason. Exposure to the trades as a potential career path is important but if we aren’t teaching students how to find their own solutions to problems then I think that’s a failure. I think that ideal of “learning to learn” is the core tenet of a college education but gets perverted by the exorbitant costs, for-profits, test prep industry, etc.
I probably learned more about researching and parsing information on the internet in my humanities classes than in any STEM class. On the other hand, hands-on experience can’t be learned from a book. Maybe for some students teaching procedures/content is the best we can do - again, mixed feelings about this - but ideally we are imparting both content and general methods for students to use.
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Not in use for FRC, but I have one of these in my garage for a 100’ CAT5e cable (hardwired to a gigabit switch on one of my workbenches):
(yeah my shelf is a mess… and the reel doubles as a hanger for a couple of many volunteer badges!)
Some of the welding robot cells at work use them for managing teach pendant cables, which is where I got the inspiration (not to mention I found one brand new for dirt cheap at a thrift store).
Might be a good fit for a robot cart with a OI stand. The “fixed” end would stay with the OI on the cart and the reeled end would got to the robot. When done with practice/debug, just unplug it from the robot and and reel it up.
Edit- seems these are out of stock everywhere… they were still in production as of last year. 
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My team (4213) has a ethernet-to-ethernet adapter on the end of the tether to connect to the rio’s Ethernet. When the tether is not in use, we put both ends of the tether cable into the adapter.
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