Last year my team literally mounted a wooden board to the bottom of our drive base so we could mount all our electronics. I was hoping this year we could do something a little bit more professional and better looking.
Wood is good -some influential mentor
Is there any specific problem wood presents besides looking unprofessional in your opinion? We’ve used wood bellypans for electronics every year except our last (and the swap to aluminum was driven by a new frame design), and have been painting them since around 2009 to match the frame color.
Wood is easy and inexpensive to fabricate with, reduces a risk of shorts on sharp edges, dampens vibrations, and is fun to spin as better than aluminum to judges.
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And to add to that, if you get a high-quality wood, it looks good on its own. Try baltic birch plywood, cut to fit, and sand the edges. (Sanding alone increases the professional appearance.)
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Wood robot parts look great if made with good workmanship. Robot parts made from X look terrible if made with poor workmanship.
X = material of your choice
Carbon fiber is pretty neat too…
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This is what we use. It is compact but you need a good sized 3d printer to make it.
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We’ve used Lexan so we can see other components and mechanisms rather that blocking large areas of visibility. It has some drawbacks due to bouncing if not supported. And I don’t think the students take it seriously when manufacturing. I agree that material is less important than craftsmanship and planning.
My team used polycarbonate to mount our electronics this year.
Our pneumatic tubes and pressure gauge were inbetween the two sheets of polycarbonate. It’s kind of hard to see due to the pieces being clear. But this setup worked well for us. We ended up mounting 6 solenoids inbetween the sheets as well. This got a bit cramped when trying to fix anything involving those solenoids, but overall this setup worked well. It kept our airtanks protected from any possible defense, and we were able to run our wires through the sheets, protecting them that way as well. We had a small bottom sheet attached which held our compressor, release valve and PCM
(I do still have the CAD for these if anyone wants to take a closer look)
We use a sheet of 1/8" aluminum, CADed ahead of time (including mounting holes for components and holes for zip ties for use in wire routing). We have a sponsor who makes it on a waterjet cutter, then we sandblast it before assembling the board and mounting it on the robot.
I like plastic pegboard
and perforated polycarbonate
And have also used [unperforated] polycarbonate, plywood (luan, hardwood, and the cheap stuff) and a bamboo breadboard. Other than the cheap plywood, they all looked as good as the amount of work put into them.
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We build a rather spiffy looking robot in 2009, it was mostly plywood…the good Birch that Eric mentioned, but then we also painted it (used spray paint, sanded the first coat of paint, then painted it again). It resembled powder coated metal, when it was done.
But lately, we’ve just stuck all our electronics on a piece of plywood, and it works fine.
You might want to evaluate your priorities, too. Are you concerned about using high tech materials? are you concerned about ease of construction? Ease of maintenance? Appearance? Function? Weight? Structural integrity? Cost?
There are a lot of factors, and since I tend to value low cost, high function, and ease of construction, plywood gets the nod most of the time for mounting electronics. If you are more oriented to appearance and using high tech stuff, then you should probably use something more expensive and exotic.
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I’m a fan of perforated PVC sheets. They are much softer than polycarb and they work well.
This year we plan to integrate our electronics mounting into our aluminum bellypan, especially since the falcons make for a lot less pieces that need to be mounted.
Our Electronics board.
We have (had) an outstanding electrical engineer who was noted for training students to build very well organized component boards. This was one of his swan songs.
We used to call these constructions the “electropneumaquarium”.
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My team uses and has used polycarbonate sheets (like this) for almost all electronic boards.
Last year we mounted all of our electronics to the wood base of our robot and we had all the Wago connectors for can on the underside of the frame mounted with 3m tape
A wooden board… with a good spray paint job. (Everyone looks better in black, it’s slimming)
We’ve used smoked poly too, it looks quite nice.
Lots of choices for materials in the thread. Probably more important is planning space for electronics when doing your robot design, and thinking about access/maintenance when planning and building. For example, do you need a hinged panel to provide access? How are wires routed and protected?
Few things worse than troubleshooting field side when you can’t get to things.
But yes. Each material has its limits on what it can do. However, in the hands of a skilled crafts-person, most things can be made to do well.
We used this on last year’s robot (not sure if came from AndyMark though). Made it easy to zip-tie or bolt down all the components.