Secure and wire the motors

So in this video, we're going to begin to wire up our motors. We're using some blue wire. Again, this is just to make the wire stand out so it's easy to see where it goes. You can use any color you want. It's 22-gauge wire, solid-core. So you're going to want to use the wire strippers. Because the wire's so short, it's hard to grab onto. So I'm using the needle-nose pliers to make sure that I can pull the insulation off with the wire strippers. And of course, different wire strippers work in different ways. So we're going to loop the wire on both ends. And the first one's going to go through the remaining terminal on our single pole double throw switch that is closest to that motor. And this is of course our needle-nose pliers. Again, we're crimping that wire tightly against that terminal just to make sure there's a really solid connection. And we're going to take the other side of the wire, and we're going to feed it through the terminal on our motor. So we've got a little brass tab there with a hole in it. We're going to slide that wire through the brass tab. And once we have the wire slipped through the brass tab, we're going to bend it back. And make sure that the brass is in firm contact with that wire. So it's important to make sure that those connections are good before we hot glue them together. And we did the same thing to the other side. I just ran the wire, stripped it, and ran it through the terminal on the motor there and then, also, the terminal on our single pole double throw switch. So exact mirror image of what we just did on the previous connection. And again, it's important that you make sure that that brass tab on the motor is folded over the wire in such a way that it's got a good solid connection. If it's just on the edge, it may not stay connected. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at whether or not our motors are connected correctly. And we're going to use our power wire. And we're going to strip just a little bit of the power wire off. This is from the negative side of the battery. And the blue wire actually comes from the positive side. So we're going to strip a little bit of that wire off. And now what we can do with that wire is we can test to see whether the motors are actually working. So we're going to bend the wire over and try and touch it to the motors there. You'll be able to hear the motor spinning. Yeah. And that one worked there. And we'll see if it's connected well here. Yep. It works well there, too. So now we're ready to take our motors and hot glue all the connections together so that the wires stay in place. And sometimes what I like to do is bend the wire back up over the connection just to make sure we're doubly sure that the connection is solid before hot gluing it. Because once you get the hot glue on there, it's hard to get it off. It's hard to fix it if the connection isn't quite what it should be. Again, at this point, now we're going to hot glue the connections together and make sure that those wires stay in place. We've already validated that they are conducting electricity. We're also going to put some hot glue on that paperclip that is holding the motors in place. So that will keep the paperclip in place. And we're, again, hot gluing over the terminal there. So there's a whole lot of hot glue going on at this point in time, but it's going to hold our motors in place. And it's also going to insulate our bot. You can use the two bottle caps to hold the bot up so that the motors are off the table surface. And that will allow you to basically let the glue dry and keep the motors in the right orientation.