My robot looked so nice in Sketchup, but that’s because I omitted the wiring. As you can see from the above photo, the servo wires just don’t fit even though I’ve trimmed them once already. I also had to solder solid wire to the ends because the servo braided wire just doesn’t want to go into the breadboard holes.

That got me thinking, can I remove the connector at the end of the servo wires, shorten the wires, and then stuff them back into the connector? When I say ‘connector’ I mean this:

Well, I found this discussion here. Using a push pin, I was able to pry back the tabs and pull out the wires. And this is what I found:

I can’t figure out how to remove those metal clippy things. I get the feeling that once they’re on the wire, they’re not meant to be removed. I think you just have to cut the wiring and get new metal clippy things and clip them to the ends of the shortened wires and then insert them into the plastic plug. A lot of work, so I think I’ll just hold off on doing that for the prototype.

For now I’ll just trim the servo wires some more, and maybe solder the two servo ground wires together with a single solid wire that will go to the breadboard. Likewise the high voltages. That should simplify things a bit.

The next time I cut acrylic, the robot will be about half an inch to an inch wider to accommodate all the wires. With acrylic going for about five cents per square inch, that will add about twenty-five cents to the cost of the robot. No biggie, and in the end I’ll have enough room so that I don’t have to cut or solder the servo wires, a big cost-saver in terms of assembly time.

(On an unrelated note, let me humbly confess that I had trouble with the microcontroller because when I programmed my latest robot test sketch in the Arduino IDE, I didn’t set the pinMode to OUTPUT for pin 12 in set_up(). The sketch will still compile but causes some kooky things to happen, like (a) the LED will barely light and (b) the servos don’t run.)