Intro to Electrical Design

An introduction to the design and layout of FRC electrical systems

Most teams treat the electrical layout of a robot as a side task to be cobbled together after the mechanical structure of the robot, not something to incorporate in mechanical and strategic design. However, pay attention to top teams and you will see the amount of care they take in their electrical design and organization.

This is because electrical systems are so often a source of faults and breakage, and the best teams need to not just design for a robot that is competitive at the game but one that is robust.

Neat, well thought out, high quality, and simple electrical systems greatly reduce the number of errors occurring at competition, but they also help with ease of troubleshooting and pit checks-another feature of competitive teams.

This is especially true since during a competition we as a team will play probably around 10 qualifying matches, and assuming we do well, 2-9 elimination matches. At 2 minutes 30 seconds per match, this gives us a grand total of 30-50 minutes of play time. For thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work. For this and the sake of being competitive, every match spent broken is a match wasted.

Accessibility and robustness is often a trade-off, and there is a magical number in the middle. A great example of this trade-off is how often to create wire breaks. Wire breaks allow for easy disconnecting, which increases ease of testing, and easier replacement of stretches of wire. However, they also introduce failure points, since they are far more likely to have issues than the surrounding wire. This finding the optimal number of wire breaks in a run is important to good design.

Designing a good electrical system is crucial, and can largely be broken up into two overlapping categories: designing for robustness, and designing for accessibility.