Robo RIO hardware layout?

Hi, I am a Mentor for a high school robotics team, and I’m trying to see if Fritzing would be suitable for documenting our wiring between the robot controller (RoboRIO), motor speed controllers, pneumatic controllers, etc. My question is this: most of the ‘pre-loaded components’ are off-the-shelf items, but i don’t find RoboRIO there, for example. Is there a way to ‘draw my own’ simple sketch of the RoboRIO hardware, with terminations, etc. and then use that in a wiring diagram? Same is true of other components: can I sketch them, add terminations, etc., then include them in the wiring diagram?
Ben

A quick search didn’t turn up a RoboRIO fritzing part (it turned up a request for one with no replies about a year ago though). It is certainly possible to create a custom part however simple isn’t how I would describe the process. A look at the users manual for the RoboRIO (assuming it is the one from National labs) indicates it shouldn’t be all that bad to do if you are experienced at making Fritzing parts (however there is a quite steep learning curve to making parts). Here are links to a couple of tutorials which may give you an idea of what is involved in making a custom part (with the note that assistance is usually available here in the forums when the going gets tough :slight_smile: ):

I find Fritzing ideal for documenting one of interfaces and collections of processors and modules in breadboard view which I think is what you want to do.

Peter

If you need the highly visual breadboard view, you will have to do a slightly simplified, to scale, engineering drawing with a svg editor - look at an Adruino board from the bin, and you will see that every square and circle had to be drawn and positioned -.
If it’s a complex part you can imagine how long it will take to do an engineering drawing of it, and if you have no svg drawing experience that is another order of magnitude harder than learning Fritzing.
If you only need a bodgie part you can import a pic and fudge contacts, but you will still need an engineering drawing of the PCB view.

Do you have a pic/link, so we can see what it entails.

Looks like the necessary information is here. They have the mounting dimensions of all the connectors and the layout of the board in this document so somewhat complex in parts but mostly looks to be standard
.1 connectors:

Edit: In fact the pdf was importable to Inkscape and I’m part way through breadboard already …

Peter

Only took me 5 min to draw. :slight_smile:

Only kidding, it’s got one of those good PDF that when you import it into INK it’s a svg already. I just had to ungroup it until the text was separated, delete it, and then scale it to size. Anybody want some colouring-in practice.

As usualy change the extension from .fzpz to .svg.
NI roboRIO.fzpz (1.2 MB)

Assuming we haven’t scared you off, I have created a Fritzing part for the roboRIO which can be obtained here in parts submit:

Peter

While we look to have scared both you and the latest poster on this topic off (probably because Fritzing part making is difficult) I thought as a mentor you may have better contacts at First and/or Vex if either or both are interested in providing graphic artist support for putting a proper image to the breadboard of the functional in Fritzing but ugly voltage regulator module in this thread, and continuing on and making more modules where I do the Fritzing side and a graphic artist does the breadboard graphics around the Fritzing bits:

I think that Fritzing is probably an ideal platform (assuming the parts are available) for documenting these projects since you get both a physical layout in breadboard view and a schematic in schematic view.

Peter