We’d like to create our own ribbon cables for use with the Talon SRX. Has anyone been able to find a source for the connector? I found this on DigiKey that “looks” right:
http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/3230-10-0103-00/1175-1646-ND/3883463
Related – Has anyone been successful with their own, longer cables? I’m a bit concerned about the potential for noise and signal attenuation on longer cables.
During fall’s beta test, we made our own cable to make the very very long run (on our 2015 robot) from the top of our lifter elevator down to the drive base, across the base of the chassis, and back up about a foot again to reach the driving SRX. All told I’d guess a length of roughly 7-9 ft.
Because we were on a time crunch, we made ours by sort-of sacrificing one of the baby ribbon cables for the connectors and adding length to the existing ribbon cable via individual normal small-gauge wires. This was for the power, ground, encoder a/b, and pwm signal lines for use with the new magnetic encoder. So sadly I cannot give you a definitive source for the connectors themselves.
Test results were good and we didn’t experience any issues.
I will caveat in saying that we make our sensor wire runs far from any motor/power lines.
CTRE told us during beta they were planning longer cables for sale; you may want to check their site and see if they’ve offered them in lengths reasonable for you. If you get a good match for the connector, I am sure it will help other teams if you post affirmation here!
Good luck!
I haven’t checked personally but I think that this is all compatible with this https://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/279 I have some gadgeteer stuff and I’ll try to check to check tomorrow.
We just ordered 100’ of cable and those connectors from DigiKey. I’ll let you know how it works.
Any word on the success of the homemade connectors?
A few comments based on my own experience.
Yes, you can make a really long ribbon cable to attach sensors to the SRX. When you do this though, if you’re only using three conductors of the ten, you now have seven wires acting as antennas which can pick up noise and feed it back to the controller with potentially disastrous results. Ribbon cable is also very high gauge wire, and not made to be flexed back and forth. This can lead to breakage and if you don’t have spare cables, a time consuming repair.
What we did last year for ours was to get some premade cables (so I know they are high quality and low chance of failure), and turn them into adapters for 3pin servo connectors. Here’s an example from deep in the bowels of the robot: http://i.imgur.com/vhGthdo.jpg (there was some tape holding the sensor wires on all season, no issues with the three pin friction interface)
This lets us have a standard connection design for all of our basic sensors so they can plug into the Rio or the SRXs. Our long runs are then just PWM cable, which is cheaper, easier to maintain, more robust, and higher gauge. You can also get the header and ribbon assemblies for free from Samtec as a sample request (part number FFSD-05-D-06.00-01-N)
Did anyone confirm the linked connectors work?
I need to order some other things today and I would be interested in tacking some RoboRIO compatible connectors on my order. Would help if I knew they worked.
Not worried about the long run issue, merely want the connectors in case I need to do some R&D.
We made a couple cables with these connectors last night. Worked great. I thought with the .025" pitch between wires we might have trouble with shorting between wires when we crimped. No problems with the four we crimped.
Couldn’t find the proper crimpers, so we used a water pump pliers (gently). A bench vise would probably work well too.
As long as we’re on the subject; I found these breakout boards at Adafruit:
https://www.adafruit.com/products/2743
They fit the connectors and are a lot less expensive than the Talon SRX breakout board. They don’t scale 5V to 3.3V like the Talon board (http://www.vexrobotics.com/217-4401.html); but it sure is easier to verify that your cable doesn’t have any shorts or opens with them.
