Wire Guard for rotational joint using goBILDA pattern

thingiverse

Super Scream Bros FTC Team #14204 We're a competitive robotics team with a bold vision. For the 2018-2019 Rover Ruckus season, we engineered our robot using the goBILDA building system. One key challenge we faced was effective wire management. Our robot features two rotational joints, and during our first two league meets and practice sessions, we experienced issues with pinched wires. To tackle this problem, we drew inspiration from our experience with an X-Carve and decided to implement a drag chain for managing wires. However, the standard drag chain only rotates in one direction from center, which wasn't sufficient for our needs. Fortunately, we discovered the Drag Chain link from Bantum_Works, which provided us with a solid foundation for our design. We modified it to create a bi-directional system that met our chassis requirements. Our solution comes in two sizes: large and small wire guard components. The larger wire guards can accommodate more wires and are designed for open spaces where multiple wires need to pass through. These big guards consist of three parts: two ends that connect to a goBILDA 1120 U channel, and the center link, which can be linked as needed. The smaller wire guards are compact and designed to hold two or three wires in a tight space. One end attaches to the bottom of the 1120 U channel, while the other end connects to the inside of the 1121 U channel. These guards use a smaller link but function similarly to the big wire guard's links. We'll soon be uploading videos demonstrating our wire guard in action, but for now, we're confident that it works exceptionally well and has become a standout feature of our robot.