What techniques do teams use to keep their pneumatic tubing/wires tidy?
(besides a mountain of zip ties that is)
On the wiring side, I finally got a ferrule that works out of the inventables kit. It is the pink one with the FESTO solenoid wires. Also, we went ahead and twisted the pair together to make them more tidy.
Last year we had tubing that had to pass through a place with a good amount of movement and possible rubbing. We helped in place with little plastic cable clamps that have a bolt holes and added some corrugated split wire loom as a sacrificial cover. I did at one point have a piece of vinyl tubing that would have done that well too. You might use these to help keep tubing in place.
The best way to maintain anything when it comes to keeping it neat is planning where it will go before you cut the material. This means not going from Point A to Point B and instead running the tube/cords along places where it will sit nice (like lips on the frame or places where you can ziptie. Now I’m not saying I don’t use zipties for a lot but the worst thing to happen is to be trying to trace wires during a competition and having to cut all of the zipties off to trace two wires. In general think ahead and make sure that you can still trace wires.
Determine a “Work” and “Home” position for each pneumatic cylinder and then plumb each with a different color Ex. Home=Black, Blue=Work. Labeling each end of each tube also helps if you ever disassemble something with multiple cylinders and dont want to trace the tube back to the solenoid when re-assembling.
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