Try to keep major “hub” components (those with many connections or connections that may need adjustment regularly) easily visible and exposed. I speak from experience when I say that trying to fix something that you can’t see is a nightmare. Although this image doesn’t show any severe problems of the sort, I’ll use the placement of the sidecar as an example. As a result, sensitive analog components will not be able to perform as well.Īnother problem I often see in FRC electrical is poor component placement. Excessively long wire results in line resistance between components, and makes signal lines more prone to picking up electrical noise.
Not only do wire bundles cause repair headaches, they can reduce the performance of the robot. Those bundles will act like little walls, obstructing your view of other wires and making it difficult to do more precise repairs. Excess wire clutters the electrical panel, making it difficult to make even the simplest fixes, including replacing motor controllers and repairing damaged connections. It’s common practice to do this, but it can have a serious impact on the performance of your electrical system. However, if you look more closely, it’s easy to see that these zipties are also holding together large bundles of excess wire. In this example, zipties are used to hold groups of wires, in an effort to keep everything together. The most common problem in FRC electrical is incorrect wire lengths. Imagine trying to replace one of those motor controllers that’s pinned in by the robot frame. This is an example of a pretty typical FRC electrical layout.
#FRC PEOPLE YELLING ROBOT SERIES#
In my series of posts about electrical, my goal will be to share some of the lessons I have learned in making a reliable electrical system. When electrical is done properly, it is less likely to fail, regardless of what kind of bashing it takes. Thinking out the electrical system before building it has an enormous positive effect on the performance of a robot. These are the kind of struggles I watch many teams encounter throughout their competitions, even though the majority of these problems are preventable, and would be easy to fix if not for an inefficient electrical design. I recall spending nearly half an hour trying to plug in a PWM cable between matches at champs. Like most teams in that situation (and by that I mean 75% of FRC teams) our electrical came out messy and inefficient. We were rushed to wire the entire robot in the 3 days before bag and tag. My freshman year, I joined a 3-person electrical team in a ~40 student program. When you do electrical right the first time, the rewards are enormous. I’ve seen otherwise excellent teams miss matches because they couldn’t figure out what failed among their heap of wires. When your electrical inevitably has a failure at some point in the season, you’ll discover it’s rather hard to find one specific piece of spaghetti and put it in one specific place without disturbing all the other spaghetti in your robot.
Most of the time, electrical boards are done haphazardly in the last couple days of build, and end up messy and extremely difficult to repair. The one aspect of robot design I see overlooked the most often is electrical.
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