Is CAD essential to all teams?

[abhishekmalle]

A little preface:

So my team in the transition phase of trying to reach a level of "legit-ness" for next season. Over the past three years, we have been a group of kids that have turned out a robot each season, but with real struggle and a lack of planning. We usually have an idea of our general design, but almost all of the specifics usually happen somewhere along the way. The point being that we end up working very long days and stressed till the last minute of build season.

Is CAD the next needed step in order for us to become successful?

Our team currently has absolutely no background in CAD. And also no mentors. If we were to decide to use CAD next year, I would have to learn the software from scratch and then teach it to members in the off-season of next year.

The other option for us is to have hardcore designs/drawings on paper. Would that be sufficient?

[protoserge]

It is not required; however, it helps a lot if you can use CAD effectively.

FYI, this is the first year MOE has a CAD model of the robot that was used for a majority of the design.

There are many resources available, but my go-to is YouTube.

[Philip Arola]

You will need some cohesive, specific design if you want a world class robot. When my team has put CAD into the backseat of design, we fail. Now, as you point out, paper is perfectly acceptable. All you need is whatever works for your team, and stick with it. CAD is just extra convenient because you can import common parts. I would ask design or shop teachers if they want to help. Even if they can't help directly, they might be able to have a class with CAD.

[Tcrump47]

I would say it is and is not essential. Personally being a certified solidworks user since the beginning of 2014 i would say its the easiest to learn. If you do it well enough you can have the basic design and parts list done and ready to order. It helps a lot with knowing what you are going to build if you have a design for it. Best of Luck

[wilsonmw04]

The answer is, no. You can build highly effective robots without CAD. It depends on how you build your robot. When I first started, we used chopsaws and hand tools. We didn't need CAD, just simple hand drawings. Now that we use CNC driven equipment, CAD is a must.

[asid61]

I think it really depends on your budget, both time and money.
In terms of time, working with new designers is CAD takes a lot of time. If you don't start designing early, it will take longer to design than to simply do. If you don't own a mill, why design things accurate to 0.001"?

I do highly recommend learning CAD purely for figuring out linkages and geometry, however. That's something easier done on a computer than by hand. I would avoid paper simply because it's more hassle for students than CAD in my experience. 973's RAMP has some good videos on it.

All that being said, your robots already look incredible! I think for the build quality that you're at right now, CAD could really help you get things more cleaned up, but it's not necessary. More important than CAD and design is good strategy.

If you do go the CAD route, a small mill will help you machine parts that are very accurate, so you can get more utility out of CAD.

[JPL69]

I agree, it is an added plus if you do use it. We have been using CAD for the last few years that I have been there, and this year we had very little CAD due to student commitments. We noticed the difference and did enough for the critical parts to make sure the design functioned properly. We have some new students that are interested in CAD now, and they are learning now (just because the competition is over, doesn't mean learning is over).

As far as "no experience in CAD", it is never too late to learn. Our team switched from Java to Labview two years ago, none of us knew how Labview worked. The students and I learned together as a team in the off season, and has strengthened our student/mentor ties. If you have dedicated students that want to learn CAD, do not be afraid to start with them and learn together.

Remember that this is all about learning and what they want to learn. Even if you don't use CAD, you will still have a robot either way.

[BotDesigner]

I do believe it essential that every FRC team should do some CAD. I am design lead on a somewhat low resource team and without CAD I don't know where we would be. CAD allows you to simulate mechanisms and find interference long before you start to build them. It is critical for designing things with low tolerances (think about keeping things within 15in of your frame perimeter or figuring out the necessary dimensions for a scaler).

Also, CAD is nice because you can easily do it outside of the workshop. My team has very limited meeting times,so I do most of my CAD work at home. We then get to spend our meetings manufacturing.

This year, about a week after bag and tag, we decided to modify our robot into a defensive shield thing. Although the robot was in the bag we were able to figure out (using CAD) a way to attach a extendible 70 inch wide 54 inch tall shield to bumper supports already on the robot. It took less than an hour to attach it at competition because we knew exactly every hole that had to be drilled and bolt that needed to be put in. There is know way we could have done that without using CAD.

Engineering drawings can be useful but you CAD in general is much easier and simpler to use when it comes to mechanisms. My advice is to find a CAD software and learn to use it. Try designing some robots this offseason and post them here. You will get great feedback.

[Jash_J]

Saying CAD is essential in order to reach "the next level" is quite vague. There are many things that can be done in order to successfully have a 6 week build season but it starts from the ground up. Having the skills to CAD itself can help significantly, however it does not mean you will be successful. A good example of that is our team's robot in 2015. The entire robot was designed using CAD; however we failed to prototype effectively which ultimately lead us to believe that we could do more than we could.

If I could suggest one key aspect to build season that most teams should be capable of doing, it would be prototyping. Prototyping not only allows you to determine which mechanism would be best to solve that year’s game problem, but it also allows you to refine the idea until you have the best iteration of it. If then, you would like to CAD the prototypes and integrate them into one large robot that would be ideal, as you would find any integration problems before you reach your build phase. However, please realize that if you begin to CAD without any preliminary model to base your designs off of, it will be extremely tough to have a successful build season as there may be problems that occur once you have built the CAD model of your robot.

[Abhishek R]

No, it is not. 624 took a break from CAD in 2009 before returning to it in 2016. If you don't have any experience, it'll take time (maybe 2 years, one for you to get trained in a software of your choice and then another offseason to train others and develop an organization process - there are lots of resources to help with this, specifically 973 and 1114 have some good things to look at on their YouTube channels) to build up a system of using CAD effectively, so in the short term it will probably be better for you to stick with paper and pencil drawings with extensive dimensions. But eventually, as your team grows, your systems become more complex, and your resources expand - CAD will become a very useful tool for you to unlock a lot of potential.

[Mechvet]

Let's take a wider look at the question.

CAN you make a competitive, impressive robot without CAD, and still inspire students to pursue a career in STEM? Yes.

However, I firmly believe in not only inspiring the path into STEM, but also sending students armed with as many useful tools as possible. If you were to try to take a product to any reasonable production team on a napkin sketch, or even a simple paper sketch, you wouldn't get very far (excluding companies with drafters/modelers on hand for precisely this).

[Arkive]

If I could suggest one key aspect to build season that most teams should be capable of doing, it would be prototyping. Prototyping not only allows you to determine which mechanism would be best to solve that year’s game problem, but it also allows you to refine the idea until you have the best iteration of it. If then, you would like to CAD the prototypes and integrate them into one large robot that would be ideal, as you would find any integration problems before you reach your build phase. However, please realize that if you begin to CAD without any preliminary model to base your designs off of, it will be extremely tough to have a successful build season as there may be problems that occur once you have built the CAD model of your robot.

What would you suggest as a good balance time/resource wise between CAD and prototyping. We usually put a lot of time into prototyping but then we never put it into CAD to make sure it can fit with everything else. That hits our number one problem where our robot looks less streamlined and more cheesecaked than it should.

[cad321]

Not necessary but highly useful. One tool that I will be using next year to help teach our freshmen cad is 1114's solidworks tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG_KOHBuXHNfpa1N23ZJfAHsCVbe3fpXG).

I binge watched them all one night and found that they would be extremely useful in teaching new students CAD from the ground up.

[pmangels17]

CAD is definitely a useful tool, and through FIRST you can access the industry standard programs with a ton of packages available for no cost to you or your team. Learning CAD can be a daunting task, but the best way to go about it is to download the program, watch some tutorials (973 RAMP has good videos, so does the SolidWorks website), and do a lot of CAD. You can only get good at the program by using it a lot. If you want to learn CAD, my best advice to you is to just design a bunch of stuff, and once you have a better idea of how productive you and your team are with CAD, you can make a more informed decision on whether or not to use it during the build season.

EDIT: I personally believe that, if you use CAD productively and efficiently, with sensible designs, it is a fantastic resource, and for teams that want to "take it to the next level," CAD is not an absolute necessity, but it is definitely encouraged.

[jamesmcip]

It definitely helps any team out, as it can save lots of valuable build time to have a step by step plan with all dimensions laid out, especially if there are a lot of intricate mechanisms in place that must be accurate.

However, one mistake a lot of teams make (ours included) is using CAD instead of actual prototyping, which can create a lot of headaches after the parts are actually manufactured.

Also, in regards to actually learning the software, everything about it is surprisingly intuitive and you will be surprised what you can make. I recommend designing simple assemblies at first and practicing all constraints to learn how they work, then tackle something like designing a previous year's robot to practice for the actual build season.

[philso]

No. I have watched CAD use go from 0% to essentially 100% in the workplace over the last 30+ years.


More important than CAD and design is good strategy.

The skills needed to design a superior mechanism or to develop a superior strategy are different from the skills needed to make CAD drawings. As Asid and others have said, having the ability to do CAD will enhance your teams ability to develop superior mechanisms and strategies. Being able to use CAD tools is like being able to use a piece of word processing software such as MS WORD. It does not mean that one has the writing skills of Shakespeare or Hemmingway.


I do highly recommend learning CAD purely for figuring out linkages and geometry, however. That's something easier done on a computer than by hand. I would avoid paper simply because it's more hassle for students than CAD in my experience. 973's RAMP has some good videos on it.

An example of this would be to draw a simple profile of your robot and "drive" it under the Low Bar to make sure it really fits.

In addition to using tutorials on YouTube, it would be best to supplement that with some "CAD Mentors", even informal ones. I was asking one of my co-workers for tips on how to do specific things in SolidWorks. He would email me sequences of screen shots and I would pass them back to our CAD team. It saved them hours of time.

[Billfred]

A few thoughts:

1) I've hung banners with thoughtfully-designed robots done with a measuring tape, angle and box aluminum, and pop rivets. I've had well-CADded and waterjetted robots miss the show. There's no magic bullet here.
2) Knowing your fabrication resources is instrumental to making any CAD work. If you can't buy or lathe a shaft to fit an application, you shouldn't be putting it in the drawing! If your machine shop's tooling has a minimum radius on cuts, make sure your lightening pattern's corners have at least that radius! Start this conversation now, and do some smaller-scale tests before betting the farm.
3) Part of legit-ness is having time to practice driving. Can you turn around a drivetrain that fast, and is it that much better than the kit drivetrain (or the kit drivetrain with some bolt-ons)? Do you have means to keep old robots together and running so the drivers can get some stick time in before this robot is together (and some time against defenders afterward)?
4) Another highly underrated part of legit-ness is just not dying. Did your robot break down this year in a match? What happened there, and how can you fix it on the next robot?

[ASmith1675]

CAD is merely a tool. When used in effective combination with prototyping and effective game analysis it can help to raise your capabilities.

Designing a robot completely within a CAD program will allow you to see issues and interferences in 3d space that you may not have accounted for with a design in your head, or even on paper sometimes. The more detailed the CAD model, the less likely you'll run in to these type of issues while building.

To make full use of these advantages requires a slight change in thinking (in my opinion). While simply building things in a computer may not feel like much is getting done, by properly planning out where everything is going to fit, it reduces the time to put everything together. This might mean you don't have ANY parts for your robot for week three (or later sometimes).

The other thing that needs to be taken into account is the manufacturing capabilities of your team. If you don't have access to a mill (manual or CNC) you may have to account for the lower accuracy with which a part can be manufactured. If you have a sheet metal sponsor, you may be able to have parts cut and bent to very high precision. These issues are the ones that are often most difficult to account for. (Can't tell you how many times I've thought of a design that would be difficult/impossible to manufacture given the facilities and resources of the team that I am working with).

CAD is just a part of the equation, though arguably a big one. Being able to effectively analyze the game (to pick the right mechanisms to build), and prototype effectively (to verify your "theory" designs work in the real world), also play a critical role. Can you build an effective robot without CAD? Definitely. I do believe that becoming more proficient with CAD will tend to increase the consistency of robot builds year after year (meaning fewer of the "our robot didn't do what we wanted" years).

The other posters in this thread have provided some excellent resources to get started. Just digging in and messing around with the programs is a great way to learn.

[GreyingJay]

The real answer to your question is: to take your team to the "next level", you need to start working through a proper engineering process.

You can build a robot by assembling the Kit of Parts and then spending the next six weeks trying to improve it. "Ooh, I have an idea!" "Well, that didn't work." "Ooh, I have another idea!"

However, this is not engineering. This is hacking.

Engineering is a disciplined process. There are various definitions, but one I found on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_design_process) lists these steps: research, conceptualization, feasibility assessment, establishing design requirements, preliminary design, detailed design, production planning and tool design, and production.

For FRC, that would look like:

Research/Conceptualization - what is the game? what are all the possible things a robot could do? What are the offensive actions? What are the defensive actions? What are the point values of each? What are the cycle times of each action? What can be done in a 2-minute match? In a 3-robot alliance, how could each robot contribute?

Feasibility Assessment - Of all these things that could be done, what are the easy things? What is harder? Is a harder task worth it? This starts to take into account your team's level of ability and available resources. For example, climbing is a hard task. Maybe it takes 20 seconds. It's worth 10 points. Are there other actions you could do in 20 seconds that could score the same, such as scoring two high goals or damaging the fifth defense?

Design Requirements - Based on all the above, choose what you are going to focus on. Lock this down early to prevent scope creep. For example, we decided early on that our robot would be low bar capable, would shoot low goals, use vision assist for an autonomous low goal mode, be FAST, and be able to handle all the ground obstacles. It was tempting at various stages to try to add a climber, high goal capability. a sally port door opener, etc. But we knew we didn't have the resources to build a Swiss Army Knife on wheels. We kept our focus on the design requirements we agreed on, knowing that if we had time later, we could go back and iterate.

Preliminary design - brainstorming, napkin sketches, prototyping. Now you have a rough idea of exactly what you want to build.

Detailed design - now you nail down exactly how the mechanisms are going to be built, their dimensions, weight, cost, etc.

Where does CAD fit into all this? It helps you with the design stages, and it forces you to actually DO the design stages so you're not tempted to jump right into the shop to start cutting metal without first having a plan. Plus, it is a tool to help you with those design stages so you can play with dimensions and designs without committing to building anything first.

[Jash_J]

What would you suggest as a good balance time/resource wise between CAD and prototyping. We usually put a lot of time into prototyping but then we never put it into CAD to make sure it can fit with everything else. That hits our number one problem where our robot looks less streamlined and more cheesecaked than it should.

Typically we only dedicate a week to prototyping. However you can always give or take a couple days from that time period depending on the complexity of the game. If you are able to outline clear constraints and variables during the first day or so of build season, you should be able to complete the prototyping phase in about a week. This allows you to have a good amount of time left over to CAD.

Ideally, because you stated that your team is not familiar with any CAD software, I would suggest conducting workshops over the summer, even indulge yourself in a mock 2 week build season where you prototype and CAD a robot from a previous game over the summer. This will help you familiarize yourself with how tight the process can be and if it is feasible for your team to conduct during build season.

[connor.worley]

Yes, you need CAD. You will still be stressed to the last minute of build season, but you need CAD.

[cadandcookies]

I'll answer both the title question and the OP's question.

1: Is CAD essential to all teams?

No. Not even close. CAD is a great tool, but you can run a successful FRC team (and build a competitive FRC robot) without CAD.

2: Is CAD the next needed step in order for us to become successful?

Possibly. I think it can be hugely valuable for a team to learn CAD, whether you have mentors in it or not. Be aware that you are in for a slog if you don't have any mentors coming into learning CAD-- when you are learning CAD, you are learning a new language, one that translates your thoughts into shapes on a screen instead of words on a page or audio signals. If you don't have someone who already speaks that language, you are going to figure out a lot of stuff on your own. Like others have mentioned, you're looking at a couple of years to really integrate CAD into your team, especially if not everybody is on board. Don't be afraid to design only parts or subsystems of your robot first-- you don't need to just jump into the deep end.

Best of luck in your future seasons.

Also, ff you choose to learn Creo, feel free to PM me with any questions. While I'm not a professional engineer, I am pretty good at using and teaching Creo for FTC and FRC (by the way, this is a standing offer to just about anyone-- I'm not a complete expert, but designing stuff in Creo is a hobby of mine, so I know a decent bit).

[Boltman]

Not essential..can help

We uses CAD mainly to figure out overall bot dimensions for what we wanted to do and bumper placement in first week or so. It was something "to do" until the parts came in.

[waterbott]

Hey Johns Creek! Its nice to see you guys on Chief Delphi. PM me, I might be able to help you guys out with getting started with CAD.

For us, CAD serves as both a tool and a supplement to design; however, it is important to remember that the quality of design through CAD can only be as good as the users. Our team has been successful without CAD before; however, the quality of design depended highly on having a solid understanding of the mechanics behind the design. In many ways CAD serves a a crutch as it helps us visualize some design problems before they are built; however, without a solid understanding of mechanics, CAD can only help so much.

For our team, we started recently started the process of designing with CAD first before building it. We've had a mixture of successes and failures from this approach. For example, one thing we noticed is that because many of the members dedicated to CAD had little background working in fabrication and assembly, we weren't "designing for manufacturability", meaning that we created designs that were either too complicated to fabricate or difficult to assemble. The convenience of CAD made us overlook some of these problems. One of the successes we had with CAD is that it let us lay out the design before it was built and archive an analyze and changes we make. It proved to be an invaluable tool for visualization as well as easing the fabrication process.

Conclusion to this rambling? Having a successful robot primarily predicates on having a foundational understanding of what you are building, CAD serves as a tool that can only be as good as the person who wields it.

[Kevin Leonard]

I'll join the chorus here and say it's not essential, but useful.

I'll also add that my use of CAD in FRC has helped me immensely in college. It's a phenomenal tool for solving tight packaging problems (which this year definitely had).

[protoserge]

The real answer to your question is: to take your team to the "next level", you need to start working through a proper engineering process.

...

Design Requirements - Based on all the above, choose what you are going to focus on. Lock this down early to prevent scope creep. For example, we decided early on that our robot would be low bar capable, would shoot low goals, use vision assist for an autonomous low goal mode, be FAST, and be able to handle all the ground obstacles. It was tempting at various stages to try to add a climber, high goal capability. a sally port door opener, etc. But we knew we didn't have the resources to build a Swiss Army Knife on wheels. We kept our focus on the design requirements we agreed on, knowing that if we had time later, we could go back and iterate.



If there is anything to take away from this thread, this statement is it. Understand how to set requirements and design to those requirements.

That's good engineering.

[messer5740]

Is someone willing to direct me to tutorial videos on CAD or to send me an email about how I can incorporate CAD into next year's design?

[indieFan]

CAD is a great tool provided the people using it understand that just because something may be designed in CAD doesn't mean it may be manufactured.

My example for students is always: You can draw a solid steel sphere with a hollow core, but how are you going to make it with no seams? As far as I know, you can't.

The other example is that a student drew a wheel knowing we had access to a CNC machine. What the student didn't know/understand was that it was a 3-axis machine and couldn't do the angled portion of the wheel that he was expecting to be done.

[protoserge]

CAD is a great tool provided the people using it understand that just because something may be designed in CAD doesn't mean it may be manufactured.

My example for students is always: You can draw a solid steel sphere with a hollow core, but how are you going to make it with no seams? As far as I know, you can't.

The other example is that a student drew a wheel knowing we had access to a CNC machine. What the student didn't know/understand was that it was a 3-axis machine and couldn't do the angled portion of the wheel that he was expecting to be done.

Out of curiousity, would you mind posting the wheel drawing in a new thread or upload an image? It might not be impossible on a 3 axis machine and would generate some good discussion.

[SteveGarward]

CAD is a tool, like pencil and paper. We use it extensively, but we have experience in doing so.

As others have said, work on your process. To me, more important than CAD are, in this order:
1) A solid understanding of your means with which to build, and how to use them effectively
2) A solid game strategy
3) A solid, decisive list of tasks you want your robot to achieve (this comes from working out your gameplay strategy, and does not have to be everything in the game!)
4) Building effective, rapid prototypes of the mechanisms you want to build for the robot (good enough to take final measurements from, to draw up/build real robot assemblies from)
5) Get some of the basics down, and don't reinvent them every year (for example, work out a good drive train, stick with it a few years, so you can focus elsewhere. Then try more complex stuff when you have more experience)
6) Keeping things simple

Once you have that down, you can more easily start to introduce CAD as a tool to help with the design of assemblies and the robot. If you can build working prototypes, you can build better final assemblies, whether you use CAD to help with that or not. If you plan these around readily available components like versa frame and gussets, you can still build well, without CAD.

For example, here (https://youtu.be/HnWltmLfQgo?t=24s) is our second prototype of our shooter this year, both built in 1.5 weeks, along with all the others. The first was very, very rough, made from plywood. After some sketches and working out geometry and measurements on paper/whiteboards, we built this which was a much closer-to-final working model. From this, when we had it working just right, we measured it up, then drew up that as a sketch in CAD, to use in final modeling of parts.

Obviously if you have a sponsor cutting parts for you, CAD will be essential. But to me, that comes in time. My list of 'things that come before CAD' is kinda like getting your house in order first.

This also doesn't mean don't learn it - it takes time. Start now. But that doesn't mean it's the solution to every problem. If you are too slow using CAD for build season but are relying on it, you may not have a robot at all.. :eek:

[waialua359]

CAD is essential to our team because I hate wasting material and eyeball engineering.:ahh:

[indieFan]

The wheel was designed back in 2003, I believe. I do not have any copies of the design. Is it possible? Probably, but not cleanly on a 3-axis machine with the tools that we had available per the Professor whose lab it was in.

[Michael Blake]

CAD is essential to our team because I hate wasting material and eyeball engineering.:ahh:

AND it certainly eliminates the "insert magic" phase of building a bot.

Example: "How we gonna mount the motor/gearbox to move that turret?" "We'll just see how it looks after we build the tower and TA-DA 'insert magic'"

NOPE. Doesn't work.

LOL ;-)

--Michael Blake

[Sid323]

As a CAD team member of Team 1683 (your friendly neighbors), we would have no problem helping your team with learning SolidWorks in a robotics context. Email me at sidharth.potdar@gmail.com and we can discuss plans if you want.

[EricH]

I would consider that CAD is essential to all teams. However, I do not necessarily consider Computer Aided Design essential to all teams.




CAD may also be Cardboard Aided Design, Crayon Aided Design, or Coffee Aided Design. I suggest avoiding the latter late at night, though--you need your sleep, and nobody really knows if it works.


What I'm getting at is that you don't have to use the computer to make your designs. You will want to do scale models or drawing of some form, and CAD can make those much easier. But, as others have noted, CAD is merely a tool. Witness: this thread (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89768).

Personally, I'm partial to using good ol' pencil and paper on occasion, at least for concept drawings. And I have been known to use Microsoft Publisher (and/or PowerPoint and/or Paint) as a CAD program. No joke.

[abhishekmalle]

Ok, ok. So I'm getting the general feel here. CAD isn't absolutely needed for a successful team and could maybe be postponed till we actually have a mentor of some sort.

To the teams that CAD:

-Is the entire robot done in CAD before the manufacturing process begins? Or is there more of a rolling system where the robot is built as the CAD is completed?

-How much of that aforementioned planning is actually useful or are you just going through the motions?

-How do you go about generating interest for CAD? At least at my school, people don't exactly turn their heads at the prospect of joining robotics to CAD.

-How many people does it take to have a reasonably sized CAD team?

To the teams that don't usually CAD:

-Do you still have the entire robot planned out on paper (including dimensions) before manufacturing?

-How much of that aforementioned planning is actually useful or are you just going through the motions?

-Are there any specific build season procedures that you go through that have helped you in the absence of CAD.


I just realized how many times I used "CAD" in this post. :ahh:

[sdcantrell56]

Hey there. We are in the metro area as well although not quite neighbors. Our robot is entirely designed in CAD before machining. Almost nothing on the robot was fabricated without a CAD design as well as design review with at least one mentor. Part of this is because most of our fabrication is by CNC equipment, but also because we don't like wasting material or man hours on something that won't fit or work properly.

Using CAD will absolutely help you. It will not; however, be a revolutionary change without the knowledge to back it up. I recommend the most important step you can take is finding at least one engineering mentor, preferably a couple with different skill sets. I might even know of one who wouldn't mind helping out sometimes (PM me for details). The next biggest thing is learning how to analyze the game and decide what the important tasks are and what are tasks that you can reliably accomplish with your resources. This one is tough because you have to realistically assess your teams abilities and resources. Trying to do everything this year was pretty much unrealistic for most teams, especially teams in Georgia. Not being harsh, just reality.

Would love to talk more about it, so feel free to message me. We can maybe even set up some time to come down to Westminster to see how we work.

[GeeTwo]

If you have a sponsor or in-house workshop that is just waiting on your CAD to crank out beautifully worked pieces, and you aren't CADding yet, then absolutely CAD should be on your short list of talents to develop. If your machining is done in-house on a drill press or chop saw, then you have a real question as to whether CADding your robot design would be an improvement. The bottom line is that CAD is a tool whose real value is dependent on your team's other manufacturing capabilities; your team may or may not be ready to improve its processes based on CAD.

[Creepy97]

This was the first year that i was told that we CADed before we made the robot and from what i could tell we all knew what to do alot more than last year.

CAD is useful!

This was sent to me by one of my teams mentors for learning CAD on my own.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmA_xUT-8UlLmTvSAketheHaNQWxNA5yT

[Charles Boehm]

Our shopmates 3130 haven't used CAD to model their robots or mechanisms for at least the last four years. Anyone who follows Minnesota's top team's knows that they have been quite successful without it. Evidently not essential, but our team finds it pretty great. :) Especially because we can build up relationships with sponsors making us cool fancy parts :D

[pmangels17]

-snip-
Don't be afraid to design only parts or subsystems of your robot first [in CAD]-- you don't need to just into the deep end.
-snip-

bold added for clarification.

This is also quite true. Designing an entire robot in CAD might not be a feasible or efficient solution for your team. However, stuff like the paper-template-to-make-gussets technique, which requires CAD, could definitely prove useful to a team trying to manufacture more accurately. Also, even rough sketches to find correct geometries or to make sure everything will fit in the space you want can be a huge help to robot construction. Additionally, this will help you get your feet wet and give you real experience with CAD during build season, while at the same time making sure that if CAD is not a solution for your team, you haven't invested so much time in it that other design approaches will no longer work.

[ASD20]

It definitely is possible to learn CAD well enough for FRC in the offseason. As the design lead of my team this year, I had to lead the CAD of our robot and had no real CAD experience prior to last Summer (unless you count SketchUp). So, over the summer, I taught myself to use inventor. I learned a lot from doing that and I have a few pieces of advice on how to do this. I am not a CAD expert, but rather an expert on being a complete CAD rookie.

1. Make sure you have a project
It is really hard to stay motivated and interested when just following tutorials or CADing random things. I first started designing a button board and then a t-shirt cannon robot which we eventually built. Having a project gave me motivation and also a lot of practice and ability to learn from my mistakes due to the size of the project.

2. For FRC, you don't need to know what most of the CAD software does
95% of the parts I design are made almost entirely of circles, rectangles, and hexagons arranged in a circular or rectangular pattern. Most of the more complicated parts are COTS and you can just download the models. However, I will say the one thing you should learn as soon as possible is that pattern tools are your friend. Trust me, I probably drew 200 individual 1/4" holes spaced 1 inch apart before I learned about patterns. Assemblies for robots can be difficult and I still don't know a lot of the best practices, but that is something you should devote more time to because a lot of robot CAD is assembling COTS parts.

3. Learn as you go
I wouldn't personally recommend going through complete tutorials, though if that's how you learn best, don't let me stop you. However, I find it is best to work on a project and when you reach something you don't know how to do, then go and watch a short tutorial or ask somebody. I find this is a lot more efficient and you will also learn a lot just from repetition, especially in term of good practices for easy modification and assembly. In my early projects the last few parts are noticeably (and somewhat entertaingly) better drawn and organized than the first parts.

[orangemoore]

2. For FRC, you don't need to know what most of the CAD software does
95% of the parts I design are made almost entirely of circles, rectangles, and hexagons arranged in a circular or rectangular pattern. Most of the more complicated parts are COTS and you can just download the models. However, I will say the one thing you should learn as soon as possible is that pattern tools are your friend. Trust me, I probably drew 200 individual 1/4" holes spaced 1 inch apart before I learned about patterns. Assemblies for robots can be difficult and I still don't know a lot of the best practices, but that is something you should devote more time to because a lot of robot CAD is assembling COTS parts.


A good rule of thumb I follow is if you are ever thinking, "There has to be a better way" google whatever you are doing and I bet there is a better way.

[Monochron]

but with real struggle and a lack of planning.

If your problem is lack of planning, adding another task isn't going to fix it.

[evoluti1]

Let's take a step back: the D in CAD stands for "Design." If you had asked instead, "Is design essential to all teams?", I think the answer is obviously yes. Whether you're a rookie with no mentors or an IFI team, you should do some amount of design before you start building.

So the real question is, "Is it essential for every team to design some or all of their robot on a computer?" First I want to qualify this: NO team should do ALL of their design in CAD. For instance, a large part of your design should be your
strategy for playing the game, and that's not exactly a task for Solidworks or Inventor. Also, CAD should not get in the way of prototyping - every year I see lots of robots which clearly took lots of time to model, but aren't effective playing the game because the underlying design idea wasn't refined enough through prototyping and iteration. In other words, CAD is just one part of the design process and should be understood and utilized as such. (Perhaps if you're wondering how to make your design more "legit" you should spend some time learning about how design iteration works and how the best teams use it, rather than just focusing on the CAD aspect).

That said, I don't think there's a team in FIRST that wouldn't benefit from using CAD software. To restate the question I posed earlier, we might ask, "in FRC, how does Computer Aided Design compare with Cardboard Aided Design or even Paper Aided Design?"

A lot of people say that CAD is difficult to use because it's harder to learn than doing design on paper. I totally disagree with this, at least I totally disagree with the notion that drafting by hand is significantly easier to master than CAD. Learning to use CAD effectively and learning to draft by hand effectively should both be viewed as large time commitments (it's why drafting used to be an entire high school class!). If you're currently making drawings by hand, but you haven't invested that time and effort, chances are almost 100% that your drawings aren't very good, and you should be investing serious time an effort in a new skill anyway. And if you have to learn a new skill, why not choose the one that's more versatile or applicable in your future career?

With the main drawback out of the way, what are the benefits of CAD over other types of design? For all but the simplest parts, I find that CAD is quicker than hand-drafting. Of course this is largely a function of how much practice you have. But again, if you're not practiced, drawing (well) by hand won't be very quick either. For more complex parts (even if you don't have access to CNC equipment), CAD starts to really shine. Parts that contain anything more than one or two rectangular profiles or square hole patterns quickly become more time consuming to draw by hand than to lay out on a computer.

But one thing a lot of people miss is that CAD isn't just about designing complicated parts with really cool-looking CNC-cut lightening pockets - it's really a tool that can improve any robot. For determining layout of an assembly, you just can't beat CAD, especially in a game like this year where lots of teams found it important to pack all of their hardware into a small space. In addition to 3-D assembly layout, CAD can also help you determine 2-D mechanism geometry before you even start designing any parts. This year, our team was confident we could build an arm that could tackle all of the defenses before the team versions were even finished, all because we could lay out the relevant geometry and constraints in an Inventor sketch. I don't know of a better way to do that kind of planning before you start cutting metal and spending money. (And in case I haven't beat the CAD-is-only-for-fancy-parts horse enough, I should mention that when the time did come to design parts for our arm, CAD helped us figure out how to make it work with only a band saw and a drill press.)

CAD is also more forgiving than drawing by hand. Mistakes can be corrected far more quickly (and often more thoroughly) than on paper. In fact, I'd argue that the ability to correct mistakes alone makes CAD an indispensable tool to have in your repertoire. After all, what is "design" but a process of repeatedly making mistakes in a controlled way and correcting them? Anything that helps you iterate faster is a good thing.

There are lots of other aspects of CAD that make it appealing and worth your time to learn, but if you do decide to pursue it, I think these are the main features that you will soon find indispensable. Like I said, I don't think there's a single team in FIRST that wouldn't benefit from being able to do high-level design and correct mistakes before it's too late. For these and lots of other tasks you simply can't do better than CAD.

[Knufire]

My opinion is that CAD is a communication tool.

CAD helps you lay out your ideas and communicate them to other team members. CAD helps you better communicate your ideas to the more logical part of your brain and flush these ideas out in more detail. CAD will help you communicate to your manufacturing team exactly what parts you need made and communicate your assembly team where those parts go.

CAD, however, will not take bad ideas and turn them into good ones. CAD won't make up for deficiencies in the other areas of the team you're trying to communicate with. CAD won't make a plan for you, just give you a method to better communicate your plan to other.

Also, learning to CAD will not teach you to design. Just because something looks like it will work in CAD does not mean it will turn out the same in real life.

[daliberator]

In the past two years, my team has been working to get more CAD involved in our build process. I think that if you have the time, it is an extremely valuable tool for anyone on the team to know. If a student on our team learns CAD, it allows that to articulate their ideas better, and they become more engaged with the design of the robot.
One thing that I think is very important to keep in mind is that CAD skills != mechanical design skills. CAD is not a silver bullet that will transform your team into a powerhouse. Learning it has been fun and allows people to experiment with geometries and apply their design skills in a way that could not be done on paper. It is an amazing tool for robot design, but even the best tool in the world is useless unless the person using it know what they're doing.

[346CADmen]

Is CAD essential to all teams?
No, but neither are power tools. Like power tools, it can provide improvement if used properly. The free to teams software, all, provide decent tutorials.

[wireties]

Organization, money/sponsors, mentors/teachers, and disciplined processes are all necessary to reach a high level. CAD, used productively, can move the process part of the equation to another level. CAD allows one to express ideas accurately, to see if the ideas fit into the whole and to communicate the design to helpful sheet metal and machine shop sponsors. And CAD is THE way it is done in the professional arena.

Even 2D CAD is helpful but being able to animate 3D CAD is the holy grail. Accurate animation lets you try out the geometry of basic designs w/o wasting time building them. Nothing is more demoralizing than building a elegant piece of the robot only to find out it does not fit, is too heavy, the ball does not fit etc.

[abhishekmalle]

How soon is the CAD model done during the season? Or is it a continuous process where as soon as the CAD is done, the building of that part is undertaken?

[asid61]

How soon is the CAD model done during the season? Or is it a continuous process where as soon as the CAD is done, the building of that part is undertaken?

For us, it varies depending on the experience of the members. Generally as soon as the drivetrain CAD is done we machine it, but we wait to machine other things until we are sure nothing will interfere with each other.

[EricH]

We're pretty much continuous CAD/manufacture.

CAD a part, built a part. Keeps us busy...

[Sid323]

Ok, ok. So I'm getting the general feel here. CAD isn't absolutely needed for a successful team and could maybe be postponed till we actually have a mentor of some sort.

To the teams that CAD:

-Is the entire robot done in CAD before the manufacturing process begins? Or is there more of a rolling system where the robot is built as the CAD is completed?

-How much of that aforementioned planning is actually useful or are you just going through the motions?

-How do you go about generating interest for CAD? At least at my school, people don't exactly turn their heads at the prospect of joining robotics to CAD.

-How many people does it take to have a reasonably sized CAD team?

To the teams that don't usually CAD:

-Do you still have the entire robot planned out on paper (including dimensions) before manufacturing?

-How much of that aforementioned planning is actually useful or are you just going through the motions?

-Are there any specific build season procedures that you go through that have helped you in the absence of CAD.


I just realized how many times I used "CAD" in this post. :ahh:

As a team that has more recently been designing in CAD as opposed to just modeling after design, the entire robot is extremely difficult to have finished in CAD before any manufacturing begins. Prototyping still needs to be done early on (and continued for several weeks) and the overall strategy/design still needs to be laid out before any serious CAD work can begin, since you can't really just CAD something without an end product in mind.

For the first time, our CAD team this year was able to have the design (mostly) modeled before the final manufacturing began (after about 3 weeks). However, we continued to work on resolving issues throughout the remainder of the season using CAD, whether that was by creating new parts to resolve rising problems, or by providing information to other sub-teams.

As for the team itself, it is rather difficult to get kids interested, but letting them know that all mechanical engineers use CAD, not a drill, as their primary tool can convey the importance of CAD. The team definitely does not need to be large; I've found that any number greater than 5 directly working on a CAD project can be counterproductive. This does not mean, however, that there should only be 5 students capable of CAD on the team. I recommend training as many people as possible, if only to provide them with the basic tools of engineering.

[jman4747]

How soon is the CAD model done during the season? Or is it a continuous process where as soon as the CAD is done, the building of that part is undertaken?

It depends on how you are making your parts and what your resources are. This year we acquired a sheet metal fabrication sponsor on top of milling and turning ops we already had access to. Anything we wanted done in sheet metal needed to be sent off in one big order as based on the lead time we wouldn't have parts we sent of later back in time. The milled/turned parts could be made almost on the fly and get back in less than a week so we were able to iterate more with those.

It all depends on your specific situation. And you don't have to use CAD to make a complete 3D model of the robot. Even dimensions on a 2D sketch overlaid on to the kit chassis model can be a very valuable tool during fabrication.

[philso]

My opinion is that CAD is a communication tool.

CAD helps you lay out your ideas and communicate them to other team members. CAD helps you better communicate your ideas to the more logical part of your brain and flush these ideas out in more detail. CAD will help you communicate to your manufacturing team exactly what parts you need made and communicate your assembly team where those parts go.

CAD, however, will not take bad ideas and turn them into good ones. CAD won't make up for deficiencies in the other areas of the team you're trying to communicate with. CAD won't make a plan for you, just give you a method to better communicate your plan to other.

Also, learning to CAD will not teach you to design. Just because something looks like it will work in CAD does not mean it will turn out the same in real life.

Yes!

If one cannot communicate the design to others on the team, the design becomes unmanufacturable by anyone other than the person who drew the design. This usually means making manufacturing drawings for each and every non-COTS part.

We had two team members doing the CAD work on our robot this year. One of them covered the drivetrain, utility arm and collector mechanism. He spent many hours cutting all the parts for the drivetrain and utility arm on the team's mill and CNC router because he was also the only one on the team that knew how to use those tools. When the CAD of the collector was handed to other team members, he had to pull up his CAD and give them all sorts of dimensions for the lengths of the tubes and the locations of the holes. When they did not have a particular dimension, they either guessed or stopped until they could ask him for it.

My son did the CAD for the upper structure/bumper supports. I insisted he make manufacturing drawings for all the parts he created and post them on the team's Google Drive. Due to his school schedule he could not attend all the meetings. The manufacturing drawings allowed other team members to cut them out and drill all the holes without him present. Ultimately, he only put in about 10% of the effort needed to manufacture those part and only because no one was available to do the work on the day he was able to go to the build meeting.

[Michael Hill]

In my opinion, even if you're not going to use CAD to print drawings and manufacture off of the drawings, you should at least do 2D prototyping with the drawings. It's WAY faster to iterate on the computer than it is in wood, especially when it comes to getting the right cylinder locations, appendage movements, and even drivetrain when looking at going over obstacles. It helps you determine just how much ground clearance you need to put in.

[philso]

In my opinion, even if you're not going to use CAD to print drawings and manufacture off of the drawings, you should at least do 2D prototyping with the drawings. It's WAY faster to iterate on the computer than it is in wood, especially when it comes to getting the right cylinder locations, appendage movements, and even drivetrain when looking at going over obstacles. It helps you determine just how much ground clearance you need to put in.

You can get rid of many of the configurations that have no hope of working without having to spend the time and effort to prototype them. You can then focus on prototyping the ones that have a good chance of working.

[Jake177]

CAD is not essential. As others have said, it is a tool that can provide a lot of benefit in the right hands. In the wrong hands, it can give false confidence in a design that is not practical.

Currently, the design process we try to follow boils down to:

Defining requirements - These should be S.M.A.R.T. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria)
Basic 2-D mock-ups - This can be a sketch in CAD, a linkage made out of cardboard, whatever we can do quickly to get the basic geometry worked out.
Prototyping - This can help narrow down designs if multiple 2-D mock-ups showed promise. It also gives us a chance to test things like ball compression or grip material.
Basic 3-D CAD model - This is detailed enough to build a full working version of the mechanism, but usually missing things like lightening patterns. If we're unsure about mounting points, the model may contain an array of holes that we can choose from when assembling everything.
Initial integration check - Before cutting metal, we like to make sure everything will fit together, at least on a high level. Sometimes this only happens as blocks in PowerPoint, other times it's a full 3-D model.
Revision 1 mechanisms - These generally become our practice bot. There are always things to be learned by actually assembling and testing everything. We try to get these done with enough time before Bag Day that we can iterate on them at least once.
Iteration cycle - The learning from revision 1 gets integrated into the CAD models, and when we feel that we have something we can put on the field at a competition we begin manufacturing revision 2. Inevitably, over the course of the competition season further improvements become apparent. We try to keep our CAD models as current as possible as the season progresses, in case additional parts need to be manufactured.


The farther along we get in this process, the more value we get from having an accurate 3-D model of the robot. This year, after our first event we decided our pickup wasn't robust enough, so we made a new one for our second competition. That iteration lasted through two events, but it's showing some wear. We're currently planning another iteration for Championship. Having a CAD model has allowed us to plan out these improvements without direct access to the robot.

[SamcFuchs]

legit-ness

Legitimacy