Hey all,
We’re pretty fed up with how horrible our wiring has been in the past two years- simply not neat, not streamlined, not anything.
We would really like some tips and pointers about how to wire extremely neatly and streamline our wiring, I’m looking for something along the lines of:
Believe it or not, there aren’t really many tips to do that. The main thing is time. Wiring takes lots of it, so make sure you have enough. Second, it helps to plan ahead where components and wires will go. Finally, use tons of zipties and fasteners.
One of the easiest ways to get neat and clean wiring with limited effort and experience would be to use wire ducts. A few well placed wire ducts on your electronics board can easily manage wiring with little extra work.
449 used this last year, and we would recommend it to all teams who don’t necessarily have the resources to create 968/1538 style wiring.
Secret: A metric ton of zip ties, zip tie mounts, and time.
Wire only stays so neat when it has a place to be, and zip ties are perfect for that. Bundle wire going to the same place (for example, PWMs from the DS to the motor controllers or power wires from the PDB to motor controllers) in a neat fashion, meaning line each wire with the same color facing each direction, and zip tie the wires together every few inches.
Keep everything standard. Use the same zip tie colors, crimp connectors, and wire. It looks better.
Actually, thinking about it, thats really it. Just set out to wire well and you will wire well. If it looks pretty, you are good.
I actually don’t have any pictures on hand of the wiring on our robot, but this was us a few nights before bag date last year.
keep your eyes peel team 340 is going to be shooting a video about a cool 3d printed part that has helped a ton
We may make a video on our wiring process, gotta convince all the wire monkies to do it first though.
Our team color codes our wires so its easier to trace/ replace if need be.
An aluminium bellypan is pretty much required for our style of wiring, but a polycarb base with holes drilled out for zipties can also be used. You’ll probably end up with some accidental holes and it won’t be very pretty, but it’s a good start towards cleaner wiring that’s easy to maintain. We used white polycarb for this in 2011. Clear might look cool. YMMV.
Use lots of zipties. Properly trim them, place at regular intervals along wire runs, etc.
Use heat-shrink tubing over crimps and splices.
When laying out runs, give yourself a few extra inches of wire when you cut. Connectorize one end, lay it out, then cut the other end to length & connectorize.
Use zip cord (nonglossy looks better).
Give yourself enough wire for strain relief.
Color coding is, in our opinion, not required. Our philosophy is that the wiring should be clean enough to easily trace without any extra markings.
^Connor is just bragging with those pics 
Totally love the wiring job.
I’m just wondering, but wouldn’t that cRIO placement be illegal? Doesn’t the cRIO ground itself? Is that a metal matrix under the electrical components.
If you’re trying to clean up, why don’t you just copy the team’s wiring in the model, and tweak it so it fits your needs? An engineer steals one’s idea and makes it better!
There is a rubber adhesive sheet underneath.
Because the types of electronics, amounts, and needed routes tend to change every year. For example, this year the reduced robot sizes caused it to be a lot harder to fit in all the required electronics.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned so far is time. You need to give your electrical time with the robot to get their job done properly. Unfortunately for us time is never on our side so a majority of our robots have been wired in a few meetings or on practice days.
Hey stuff happens! 
In the two pictures you provided, the robots are not completed, so we don’t see all the sensor and control wires…only the main power wires. It’s when you add the next few layers of stuff, that things tend to get messy.
Like everyone says, planning and taking your time are the keys to neat wiring.
I’ve heard that EJ from 254 likes to rip out the wiring his kids have done overnight if he doesn’t think it’s neat enough, just to make them do it again. This really gets great results. You can also employ the RC method of making students do pushups if they don’t do quality work. Discipline is a very necessary part of making a neat electronics board! If kids get complacent, they tend to stop aligning the power wires together, making sure that the speed controllers are evenly spaced, and even “just plugging in” the PWM cables without zip-tying them down.
As I always say: beatings will continue until morale improves!
I am generally really picky when it comes to wiring. The biggest thing I notice when it comes to wiring is make sure you dedicate space to the electronics. Often, the electronics are placed where they fit and not properly assigned a spot. Another thing that makes electronics messy is constantly fiddling with them. Moving them for other components, adding more electronics as parts are added and so on. When setting up an electronics board think about how the wires are going to run while setting up the layout. Wire way can be a nice addition to an electronics board as well as wire wrap for bundles of cable. As pretty much everyone has said, Zip Ties. Make sure to use them properly. If you are adding wire to an existing bundle of cable, cut the old zip ties as you add the new ones. It can make it look a LOT better. Labeling can help when there are connection that may appear as though they could go to multiple places (Side Car). Most often I don’t see a need to label power because if cut to the proper length it is easy to see where they should go. Wire can also go in places that may otherwise be wasted (inside square tubing, tied inside C-channel and other enclosed areas that are safe) .One thing that can help is practice. The more electronics boards you build the more you will find ways to make them look better.
In these photos it looks like for most of the length of the PDB <-> Victor power wires, both are black… did you heat shrink wire pairs along most of their length?
In many ways that seems like a great idea… it just uses a lot of heat shrink tubing!
Nope, they just align all their wire so the red is all on the bottom and the black is all on the top. The wire comes with the two strands grouped together, which makes wireing generally easier.
As DampRobot said its wire that comes connected together and the top wire is black and red on the bottom.
We use the same stuff on our robot this year from McMaster (9697T3 and 9697T4) for both 14 and 12 gauge wire. It was great stuff as it stays together making wiring easier and pulls apart with no effort when you need to put connectors on the ends.
There is one secret to making wiring look neat like the two examples above, and that is to severely constrain yourself to where you can place wires.
Think of wires like cars. You can only drive your car along roads - if you take a shortcut through someone else’s property they will get mad. In cites such as New York City, roads arranged in a square/rectangular grid pattern make it easy to navigate. To make your wiring look neat and easy to work on, we will follow this same virtual “road” grid pattern.
This means your wiring should only travel in straight orthogonal directions, and always make clean right angle corners*. To make corners that look good, use a very high strand count wire - in general the more strands a wire has, the more flexible it will be. The more flexible wire is, the easier it is to tame and make it travel along these “roads”.
This will cause large sections of your wiring to all begin running along the same path - think of these like your trunk line “highways”. Sometimes this means wires intentionally take longer paths than necessary to keep these wires on dedicated “roads”, like visible in this photo of FRC 973:
But this solution only deals with the power wires - you still need to deal with the signal/PWM/sensor wires. Keeping with the same city analogy, we need to treat these as a subway or monorail and route them on a different level from the cars on the main level.
While running wires underneath a control panel might not always be feasible (especially if it is your belly pan), one idea that works really well is to build pylons using a small (8/32 or smaller) standoff with male thread at the top, which is screwed into small (8/32 or smaller set screw) shaft collars. The shaft collars act as a anchor point for a small 4" zip tie, and the standoffs elevate this above the rest of your wiring. You can then bundle all your PWM/sensor wiring along this trunk line.
I don’t have a good photo of this from one of 148’s recent robots, so here’s a quick sketch instead:
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