So far I’ve been thinking Energy Chain, but I’m not sure if there are better ways that provide more rotation. I’d like to be able to implement full 360 rotation, but I can’t find a way to pull it off. Thoughts?
It’d be hard to implement and it’d likely get in the way of other mechanisms, but slip rings pass power through a ring that can spin infinitely while providing uninterrupted power. There is a rule against mercury slip rings so if you’re going to put something requiring Ethernet on the turret, it isn’t really viable.
We’ve just limited the range of motion of the turret, and used wires, and were careful in the routing and attaching.
There’s something about having too many degrees of freedom on a robot, that makes me nervous.
From what I learned from 254, it looked like they limited how many degrees it could rotate in code, if you’re looking to do a rotation or more, you’ve got to account for wiring going around those amounts of times.
If you’re talking about one 360 degree rotation, not too difficult. If you want multiple* rotations, slip rings are about the only way.
If you arrange that the robot-side mount point for the wire bundle is near the axis of rotation of the turret, the length of the wires won’t have to change (much) so you can just sheathe the cable rather than require energy chain or similar. For a center-fed shooter, the most likely place for this is above/behind the hood, which means you will have a blank spot in the back where your shots would hit the structure with the wires.
* Added: Sorry - I meant continuous rotation. If you can define a limit to the number of turns, there’s likely another solution.
Did you ever look at how the wires to a steering wheel work on cars from the 1990s or so? Pretty clever spring loaded wire reel…but they are limited in the number of turns. I think it will go about 700 degrees each side of center.
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We built a custom turret last season and routed wires through this flexible split braided sleeving in the middle of the turret. We found it needed some zip ties at the ends, but otherwise it worked well.
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