Does anybody have a pwm cable harness model for quickly unplugging all the pwms? We have 2 rios and want to swap them out when new code comes along to avoid the long wait times and needed the bot on hand to deploy. We need a little harness to hold all the pwms so we can unplug and replug them in at the same time.
This is just me, but this seems like a good way to ensure that something will go wrong with the wiring…
So instead of having two minutes of robot downtime to deploy new code, you want to switch out CAN, power, PWM, DIO and whatever other things you have plugged into the RIO?
If you’re deploying code enough that your deploy time is a significant problem, you should instead invest the time into a dashboard to change parameters instead of deploying every time you change your PID coefficients or whatever. (edit: or unit testing/simulation, whatever fits your situation)
I’ve found that using mDNS is a lot slower than using just the IP, especially when deploying over wifi.
Compile time is one of the few downtime moments programmers get. You can’t take that away from us!
Come to think of it, it would be faster and easier just to wait for the code to finish.
Yes, but nonetheless, we would still like a holder to keep our pwms in the same spot and same location on the pin headers.
Just eat the 12 seconds of time it takes for code to load? You almost spend more time waiting for the RIO to boot up. Not even close to worth the risk of something going wrong in this wiring process.
What you are asking for sounds great in principle but will be very difficult and risky to implement well enough for you to realize a benefit.
As Chris states, you are better off just waiting for the software to load. You can reduce the number of times you have to wait if your software team tests the software on a test bed containing your second Roborio THOROUGHLY before loading the new revision on the Roborio in your competition bot.
Unless this device you are asking for can hold all of the female connectors of the various PWM cables in precise alignment, you are likely to have great difficulty re-inserting them all. If one of the male pins on the Roborio does not line up with it’s corresponding female contact, you can bend the pin and break it off. If you make a large connector block that incorporates all of the PWM’s the insertion forces and un-mating forces becomes quite high. The tendency then is to pull on the wires themselves, breaking them. There is also one cable that is slightly shorter, say by 1/16". That cable will take most of the physical strain when the cable bundle is moved, making it more likely to break than if it was an independent PWM cable. Lastly, connectors have a limited number of mating cycles and the connection starts getting flaky towards end of life.
You are better off to use something like cable ties to strap down the cables so that each is only long enough to reach the correct position on the Roborio, making it difficult to install on the wrong position. This still requires fairly accurate and repeatable positioning of the Roborio when you swap them.
Pick your poison. That’s integral to the “Engineering” part of STEM.