We are having trouble with the connection of wires to our talon srx breakout board. We are doing our best to avoid soldering them because if something were to happen at comp it would be much harder to fix. If anyone has had an issue similar to this that you managed to solve or just know how to help it would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you-Team 1143
If it’s one of these I am not sure how you can avoid soldering; that’s how they are meant to connect. Strip a length of wire about as long as the pad, tin it and the pad, then connect the two with a touch more solder.
You should absolutely provide some form of strain-relief on wires going to these boards so that the connections do not take significant force when the wire moves. This could be as simple as zip-tying it to a nearby fixed point, or to a zip-tie mounting base (the little sticky pads). A small one stuck to the side or top of the Talon would do. Try to keep the wire fairly straight as it comes off the pads initially to minimize stress there.
I don’t recall if these boards have any provision for holding the board itself in place, but if not, you should at least strap a piece of electrical tape over it so it doesn’t dislodge from the port on a hard impact.
If you’re worried about the wires getting damaged further away in the bot, you could solder on a short section of flexible wire that you connectorize, such that anything past that point could be changed out without soldering. You could also make up spares of the breakout-board-with-connector assembly so if that piece were damaged you could swap it and fix the other one later.
Regardless, soldering at an event is very possible should you need to do that. And many teams will have the supplies and skills to help out should you need a hand with the repair.
Be sure to carefully check if whatever you plan to connect is compatible with Talon SRX.
If you do not need the level-shifting that the SRX breakout board provides, then a simple breakout board will suffice.
We used this one with the SparkMax last season (which uses the same connector and major pinouts). It doesn’t have the right labels obviously, but those are easy to remap. But importantly, it has through-holes for each pin on the connector, which makes it easy to get a robust soldered connection.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09DKDG7XN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
You get two boards + 1 cable. You will need extra cables, here is a link to just the cables:
Finally, as luck would have it, one of my holiday break projects was designing a more specific breakout board for the connector that can accept screw connections and has multiple pads for each signal (handy for the power and ground lines).
I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, but if all goes well I’ll publish the files and anyone can get some boards made for a few $ at JLCPCB.
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