FTC Wiring

There are a lot of things that can go wrong when a FTC team is in competition. There can be many mechanical problems and electrical problems. One of the many problems that FTC teams face is wiring all of the motors and sensors on their robot. Wiring the components of the robot is often a phase of the development process of FTC robots that is forgotten, even though it is very important. Bad wiring can lead to many different problems, and can be very hard to troubleshoot. You often find teams with very well designed robots that fail at the competition because their robots wiring is bad. One of the problems that can be caused by bad wiring is disconnection of the samantha module, which is the relay between the NXT (the "brains" of the robot) and the field control system (the wifi network that keeps all the robots in sync and that coordinates controller movements). If the samantha module disconnects the team who controls the robot loses all control. Often times disconnection of the samantha module leads to broken parts on the robot because when it disconnects motors will often times continue to run in the same direction. This causes the motors to burn out and it also causes some parts of the robot to just snap. Another problem that can sprout from poor wiring on the robots is disconnecting of some of the motors on the robot. A lot of times teams use daisy chains to circulate the power throughout the components of the robot. The problem with daisy chains is that if any of the wires in the chain disconnect the power to the rest of the robot goes out. So, often times you find teams that have loose wires in their robots that utilize daisy chain connections. This leads to their demise, and you often times see their robots just sitting on the field or just driving around because they are not able to move certain parts of their robot because they are disconnected. In our teams experience we have had problems with wiring. So far, we have used daisy chaining to wire our robots, and we usually run into at least one wiring problem at every competition. This year we plan on putting wiring high up on our list for things to carefully consider about and we will make sure that we use wiring methods that have worked for other successful teams. We looked online and found a manual that goes over different types of tips for wiring in FTC, and we plan on following this guide intensely. We hope that it will help our robot perform to its best, as it has helped other perform to their best as well. One of the problems that the guide covers is new ways to wire the robot other than daisy chaining to help prevent problems that come up when the teams use daisy chaining. The way that the guide proposes to fix the daisy chaining problem is to use a new power scheme, being the anderson power pole. This scheme makes it so that each motor controller on the robot has a direct connection back to the main power supply. This makes it so that single components of the robot can't disconnect, and helps with robot performance. Another problem that the manual addresses is the problem of the connectors of the batteries. Often times the battery connections will loosen over time because they are not designed for the rigorous usage that is characteristic of a FTC season. The guide says that you can solve this problem very easily by splitting the wire and then replacing the connectors. We actually did this last year before the state competition. We realized that we needed to make the improvement after we had a problem at one of our qualifiers with our power connection shorting out. It was pretty annoying for that competition, but we were able to fix the problem by the state competition, where we were able to enjoy having a robot that didn't randomly cut out on us because of power connection problems. The wiring guide also goes over ways to help keep the wiring tied down on your robot. They suggest heavy use of zip ties and wire hooks to keeps the wiring nice and clean. Last season we took advantage of this and it helped us a lot. During our first year of competition we had issues with messy wiring at one of our competitions, and it led to our robot not even moving for half of some matches. hopefully our team is able to keep on improving our wiring from year to year!

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