Since motors on turret have to spin with the turret, their wires need to be long and without fixed. But how to make sure the wires are tidy and safe in order to let turret turn at least from -180 degree to 180 degree.
The most common way I’ve seen is to use a Cable Chain, Wire Loom, or similar to bundle and protect the wires.
But the wires will swing when the robot is moving in the court
Correct. You make the Chain/Loom long enough to move with it.
And may I have photos of the wires on the turret.
3468 has never made a proper turret, so I don’t have any pictures from our robots, but here is an example from a recent video that shows their Wire Loom
We (1706) use some black plastic stuff that we can put the cables into, then wrap tape around it. We have it automatically retract with a constant force spring. I’ll send some pictures here on Monday when I head up to our shop. For now, I have a discord attachment link (won’t let me send MP4 file) showing it in action.
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Thank you, I will try it later.
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That would be corrugated wire loom (often also called Split Loom, though not all corrugated loom is split). More durable than the fabric mesh wire loom, but less flexible, could be preferable in a case you had a LOT of cables, or thicker cables, to run from your turret.
I really like the “compartment” y’all created to house the excess loom!
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Thanks for your help, I’ll wait until Monday.
Sorry I have no pictures readily available but we put the wiring harness more inside the robot than in the video posted above. You can’t see our wires and they won’t get snagged by external forces and game pieces. With the wiring “inside,” actually better described as spiraling around and down from the turret, we have complete control of their placement and they are constrained by other robot components and partially by a curvy plastic shield around them so by carefully moving the turret slowly and testing how the wiring lays safely you can make adjustments to their placement.
Also, depending on how you want to aim, you might not need +180 to -180 rotation and maybe not even anywhere near that much. Reducing the rotation range greatly eases the cable routing problem.
Using the thinnest legal wire gauge and (expensive) most flexible insulation can help.
There are rotating connectors but we have never had to resort to those so we have no experience in how well they work for the various different signal and power circuits. Might be fun to experiment with them.
edit: I made it sound like flexible is always best and rigidity is always bad. That’s not true. You might want a rigid bundle that feds well into your chosen location instead of a limp cable that collapses in unpredictable ways. It all depends! Pick a design for the routing layout and see what the “just right” flexibility/rigidity of the bundle is. Maybe flexible wires in a more rigid casing works best for you. On my team’s turret we tend to have a lot of wire that’s really stiff as a bundle thus the use of fabric since we don’t need more stiff to push in the right direction. And don’t forget you don’t have to have just one bundle; you can have two or more smaller bundles.
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My team tends to use this fabric more than more rigid tubing or channels and notice that there are more or less rigid channels depending on your need. The less rigid ones are pricey but nicely snakier.
Here’s some very neat turret wiring from Team 359 Hawaiian Kids at Port Hueneme Regional in 2022. They were finalists (and later regional winners), so it must have worked fairly well. frc359
Tip: If you’re building a bundle like this, include some spare wires so that you can replace a few broken wires without having to redo the harness.
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And no connectors or splices in the bundle!
If you want to experience maximum pain in wiring a robot, just before the first competition discover that a spool of CCA wire had been accidentally purchased and was left on a work bench and a student used it to wire the entire turret. The photo makes it look somewhat easy to change but our robot was jammed full with no nice layout like the photo. It seemed impossible to redo but it had to be done.
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