Hello! I’m Nicholas Decker more commonly known as Hixxy if u are on hack forums lol. I’m a programmer / designer and I’d just like to hear your guys’s opinions on a modular board.
Our, E-monkey Charles has been making our boards for 2 years and his wiring is awesome etc. The board contains all our Talons, co-processors, radio, and etc. It has been made of wood and guess what… WOOD BREAKS lol. So, to make the board more safe we are talking about making out of a multi layered poly carbon and encasing it. But, i was wondering would it be bad to make a modular board that can be re-used year to year and just add the comps we need? Ideas on how?
What’s wrong with polycarbonate? That stuff doesn’t break easily and is much easier to work with than CF.
How did the wood break this year? Gear hit it?
Keep in mind, in terms of re-using, anything you put on your competition robot must be built after kickoff of that season. That means that modular board wouldn’t be able to be re-used year-to-year unless it’s for a practice bot.
What’s wrong with wood? It is also easier to work with than CF. Used properly, it is more than adequate for holding your electronics. If it took a direct hit and broke, you are likely to have broken components too. If it was manufactured poorly, using a different material is not likely to solve the problem.
In addition to the polycarb panels suggested by Asid, teams often use pre-perforated polycarb panels, corrugated polycarb panels and coroplast (what we used this year) for their electronics panels.
In all the years I have been involved in FRC (since 2009), the rules have prohibited the use of parts manufactured in previous years.
Since the game is very different year to year, it is likely that the demands for your electronics panel will also be different each year. You will likely need different components, different numbers of components and will have different physical size constraints each year. By trying to re-use an electronics panel design each year, you are placing a pretty large constraint on the rest of the design of your robot.
We built something we call it robot-in-a-box. It is on a piece of polycarbonate that can fit in an aluminum carrying case (and hence robot-in-a-box). We built it to the max config that we conceivably would need (12 CAN Talons, 2 Spike relays, 2 pneumatic modules, etc). That’s the smallest footprint that can fit all that. However, this is not for competition. The idea is to have this become the “universal robot controller” where it most likely fits any years’ robot. So if we want to keep the robots from several seasons, we don’t have to invest in multiple electronics set to keep them in running shape. We just plop the robot-in-a-box on any robot, load the software and we can run any of them. Our robot-in-a-box is also a very nice demo piece where we bring it to competitions and display in our pit. It shows off the modular design and wiring methodology. It also serves as spare parts in case we need to pouch from it.
Team 3238 did modular control boards in 2015. We haven’t done the same thing since then. The modularity aspect of the boards was great, though we discovered later that complete modularity is not necessarily legal in FRC (specifically having a connector between the main breaker and the PDP). This isn’t that big of a deal, since the leads can easily be unscrewed if needed. However, the problems start with how much time it takes to make these boards. We found that the designs we came up with for 2015 would not have worked at all with our 2016 robot, and redesigning the board was not our top priority that year. While you can probably design a board better than we did that would work across more robots, we didn’t find enough benefit from the boards to make that project worth it. The main reason we didn’t find them to be very useful was the amount of resources it takes to make a complete extra set, which we were not able to do that year or any subsequent years since then. The usefulness of the modularity, in my opinion, comes mostly from being able to completely remove the board to replace with a spare as you work on the broken one.
Basically, modular control boards are great if you invest the amount of time needed to make them great. In my opinion, building a decent board during build season to work with your robot can be just as good, and won’t require the time it might take to build complete modularity into a board.
We really like the design by Team 4118… we printed the corner and it can pretty much be adapted to any design… that’s why we like it… so if you need different size, you can cut side piece and redesign pretty quick to adapt. What we really like is the fact that it standardize our controls. We also use the color anderson connectors and it made it very easy to connect the robots.
This is our Bot for Steamworks… lot of positive comments on our wire management.
In my day job, I have worked on well designed modular products and poorly designed modular products.
The well designed modular concept took a lot of time to think through all the possible combinations and permutations and to make sure that it was all manufacturable and serviceable. The people working on this modular concept were all seasoned veterans. The modularity also imposed a lot of extra overhead such as extra connectors, extra fasteners and extra enclosure pieces.
The poorly designed modular concepts were all really miserable to work with in terms of adding to or improving the design and in terms of manufacturing and servicing the equipment. The people who drove these designs were inexperienced and did not spend sufficient time thinking things through.
You need to decide whether your team’s objective is to have a cool design project or to have a robot that performs well on the competition field. If you want the former, I would strongly recommend that you keep this as an off-season project for uses such as how mikets is using his robot-in-a-box.
Nothing is wrong with polycarbonate lol. We are planning to use it next year lol. I’m not a hardware guy so I was wondering if there was anything better lol.
The wood broke this year because 2 bots ping pong balled us back a forth, broke our radio, switch and snapped the board right out of the L brackets holding it.
My idea to prevent this was to use polycarbonate layered with wood to make it strong. Then build a case out of plexiglass and brackets for it to be in. Then using Fa*change in time, to reduce the impulse on the board when hit. So, to make it take longer in the impact I wanna maybe suspend the cases while it’s in a padded slot.
Idk lol we have had about 2 of these board break so just wanna be safe lol.
I understand the rule yes this is just an idea to use. Of course not use the same parts and just move it over but to understand the concept and incorporate it as needed.
The board was made good we just got in a tight spot lol. Thank you for suggestinons on the material👍
Beautiful wiring I’ll make sure to show this to other it looks great
We got mentors from OrbitalATK who have shown us great wiring. I’ll get a picture tomorrow
If your chassis flexes more than your electronics board, this is bound to happen. What sort of fasteners are you using to hold the wood panel to the L-brackets? Use washers (preferably fender washers) under the heads of the screws to spread the force out on the panel, regardless of the material. Socket cap screws are the worst for concentrating the forces on a small area. We used 8-10 zip-ties through the holes in the kit chassis to secure our coroplast panel. It held up just fine through some pretty rough practice sessions and game play.
The case will make the whole assembly much more rigid. Unless you can make your chassis even more rigid than the case, your case will tend to become detached when the chassis is flexed. It is much easier to allow the electronics panel to flex with the chassis. If you design your robot holistically and strategically, the rest of the robot will shield your electrical components from external impacts while allowing sufficient access for manufacturing and servicing, eliminating the need for a case.
Plexiglass (acrylic sheet) has no place in an FRC robot. It shatters too easily.
Must have max configuration to accommodate robots from any year.
Must have minimum connectors in a power path to reduce resistance.
Standardized color coding so electronics can be mounted on any robot and will at least run the drive train with any year’s code. We use the rainbow color scheme same as resistors (e.g. orange=3, yellow=4, green=5, blue=6, purple=7, gray=8, white=9). So orange Talon SRX has a CAN ID of 3, yellow Talon is 4, … etc. Also standardized that for 4-motor drive train, orange is Left Front wheel, yellow is Right Front wheel, green is Left Rear wheel and blue is Right Rear wheel. That’s why any year’s code can run any year’s drive train unchanged.
Each CAN Talon has its own 9-pin D connector for encoder/potentiometer/limit switches.
CAN bus is home-run, not daisy chained to minimize cascading failure (i.e. If one Talon failed, it only affect that one Talon).
We also have a “Pneumatic-In-A-Box”. The thick green bundle with a black round connector from the “Robot-In-A-Box” plugs into the “Pneumatic-In-A-Box” which supports up to 8 pneumatic channels/valves with built-in compressor, air tank, pressure gauges, pressure regulator, pressure sensor and pressure switch.
What thickness wood and what kind of wood were you using? We used 1/2 inch plywood in Stronghold, bolted onto our drive frame with rivnuts, and we never damaged the board. We ran the robot pretty hard, and it bounced around quite a bit. We didn’t have a shoving match last year though, maybe since our robot had a massive wedge on the front…
In any case, high quality plywood mounted properly should last through a year, as long as it’s not going to get rammed by something. Polycarb would also work, and it’s flexible to boot. I don’t think the drive frame should be flexing enough to crack wood, unless there’s something wrong with it (loose nuts maybe?).
We’ve traditionally used polycarb as our electronics board. In 2015 our team mounted electronics vertically on a rather thin sheet (1/8"?). For Stronghold we went for a thicker piece (1/4" as it would hit the defenses as we drove over), horizontally at the bottom of the robot, and for Steamworks we went back to 1/8".
I’ll make sure to show this to other it looks great