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Brandon Hacken@brandonhacken· 492 views

Shorted 5V connection because of bent J1 Limit Switch Terminals

I found a short in my 5V robot arm wires. After some debugging I found the problem was in the J1 limit switch wiring. After some further debugging I found the short was inside the J1 limit switch because the terminals were bent enough that the positive and negative terminals inside the limit switch were touching internally. I am creating this post to document the problem to hopefully help someone else in the future that may have the same problem and to possibly have a conversation on how to avoid this problem with future iterations. I feel like it would be simple enough to design the base plate to have a notch so that the terminals do not have to be bent. Any other ideas?

Quote from manual: NOTE: Red and Black connectors need to be slightly bent to either side to create clearance for switch to be mounted.

Side Note: I started this project in July and I am using the arm as a first step to build an autonomous farming robot. Inspired by farmbot.io (http://farmbot.io/) but on a much larger scale using many robot arms simultaneously to give individual and precise care to plants. I am excited to share what I am doing with ROS2 and more soon. Currently I only have an Instagram account yeobot.io (http://yeobot.io/) documenting the process but I will eventually have a website. If anyone is interested in hearing more / possibly joining the project let me know.

farmbot.io

farmbot.io/

Comment 4

Brandon Hacken

After looking at similar post I think my solution will be to directly solder the wires onto the J1 limit switch so I don't have any clearance / bending issues.

Chris Annin

Thanks for the feedback Brandon, I will work on updating the manual to solder the wired directly to avoid this issue.

Brandon Hacken

Great thanks Chris!

Artem Arestov

Thank you for the great idea! Will do that mod too.

4 replies

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