Making robust LED strip lights

LED strip lights look great on your robot, and can be used to communicate robot state to your drivers, so they never need to look away from the bot. But, the strips are vulnerable to battle damage, and the wire to strip connections are fragile. Our friends at team 1610 introduced us to these LED strip light diffusion channels that make LED strip lights on your robot way more robust. Plus, the strip light units can be made on the bench away from the robot in just minutes. Here is the process for building one of these light strip units, from start to finish.

Build guide [pdf]

DIY ‘encoder stage’ for VersaPlanetary

A procedure for adding a hall-effect gear tooth sensor within the input stage of a VexPro VersaPlanetary gearbox. Requires modification of several inexpensive COTS parts; these modifications can be done by any moderately-capable FRC team in a reasonable amount of time and without use of external machining resources. This results in a robust encoder “stage” which performs comparably to a high-quality optical encoder, but for approximately 1/3 the cost.

Paper

Chief Delphi discussion