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 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 documenting the process but I will eventually have a website. If anyone is interested in hearing more / possibly joining the project let me know.
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.
Thanks for the feedback Brandon, I will work on updating the manual to solder the wired directly to avoid this issue.
Thank you for the great idea! Will do that mod too.
