Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

The other day people on our team decided if they would like to be on the mechanical portion of our team or if they wanted to be electrical...and yet again mechanical has 2 times as many members...im just curious what the balance between mechanical and electrical members is...if you do that..

D.J. 45

Well, we had an almost even number of people on mechanical and electrical in the beginning. But we also had a ton of different groups. Now that we compressed design, mechanical, manufacturing, etc... into the mechanical group...mechanical has quite a bit more. But on the other hand, I think our mechanical group will be doing more anyway, so it works out pretty well.

~Christina

Our team is fairly small, so we really don't have the luxury of splitting our team up into set divisions. Everyone has their specialties, but they learn how to do everyone else's job (for the most part) so that we don't have to stop working because none of the "electrical guys" showed up that day. It works well for our team, but I can easily see a larger team having trouble with that little organization.

MECHANICAL!!!!!
 

MECHANICAL GUYS RULE!!!!!:D :D

Just messin w/ ya DJ.........


:D :) ;)

50/50
 

The mechanical and electrical divisions of my team this year are more or less equal in the number of people they have in them, though in the past most members have opted towards mechanical. We normally try to train them all in the basics of both divisions anyways though, so that they'll have some understanding of each other when it comes to integration and when people from only one division show up but work still needs to get done.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Our team was small (10 members) so that we didn't have the ability to spilt much into multiple teams. We had one main guy that did a majority of programming and electrical work and the rest of the team was mainly mechanical, although we helped out with electronics as needed like I wrote the autonomous code in some spare time.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Holy thread revival, BATMAN!!!! I thought all threads pre-2003 were locked. Wowzers...

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

In our team mechanical tends to mix with electrical. Even though I am geared toward mechanical (geared: get it? ha), I also work with electrical like wiring Victors, Spikes, and wiring stuff together. In the same way electrical people know how to change wheels or tackle transmission issues, and things like that.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

This year, my team had 3 programmers, 4 electricians, and 9 mechanics. Now we're losing 4 seniors.. 1 from mechanical, 1 from programming, and 2 from electrical. that will leave 2 programmers, 2 electricians, and 8 mechanics. One of our mentors whose younger son will be joining the team from FLL promises us several others that are on his team. Hopefully we'll pick up another programmer or 2, 2-3 more electricians, and I'm not sure how many mechanical needs. I didn't get to see them in action as they were in the machine shop at Xerox while the rest of us met at the high school. I think mechanical needs the most people though because they end up dealing with design problems.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

our team is very small, only about 6 of us actually built the robot. we had 1 programmer, 2 electricians, and 3 machanical people. i was originally electrical, and i did a lot of the wiring, but i also did a lot of machanical as well. next year i'll also be the team programmer :)

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

bump for great justice!

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Move Zig

We have one student doing robot electrical, and the programmer does OI electrical.

Most of the build team did mechanical stuff. That's where most of the design/fabrication work is.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

for us, our mechanical and electric guys were all a part of the same team. all we had were two different teams, one for building (pneumatics, electrical, mechanical, programing) and the other was website, and animation.

This way, i believe that the students who want to do mechanical will also get a taste and get their hands on everything an engineer encounters. the other way, they get the graphic designer and website skills.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

We have 3 or 4 electronics/programming students then the other ~15ish students work on all of the mechanical parts of the robot. I would like to see our team working closer together however because this division has caused a lot of blame to be thrown around and I would like to express to anyone in doubt how important it is to keep open lines of communication so that the sorts of problems we had this year don't happen.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Hmmm the electrical part of our robot is done by one student. Myself. Not to many people on our team would like to learn how to do it. Im hoping next year we get some more interested freshmen. It is very hard to do electrical and mechanical.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

I do a little of every thing but id have to say that Computer/virtual wins, cant build the robot without the design and cant wire without the schematics, jk we all need each other to get the job done so its all good.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

This is how it works on team 610:

Mechanical is defined as fabrication, design (excluding cad) and assembly.
Electrical is defined as sensor work, wiring, IFI component placement and integration with mechanical stuff (such as if there is a turret, the electrical people have to work to make sure there is slack in the wires and also that it's not going to get tangled with other robots)

Mechanical basically always has more say than electrical. Generally the electrical system is based around the mechanical system (which is designed with little electrical consideration)

So far it has worked reasonably well; however we always run into the issue near the end of season were the electrical is running behind because the mechanical is running behind. The end result: our programmers suffer.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

We have more mechanical people on our team than we do on electrical. I myself is on the mechanical part. There is about four or five on electronics but 10 or more on mechanical.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Our Electrical team is 2 or 3 people.

Our Mechanical team is 10 or so.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Electrical all the way baby!

On our team I guess two thirds of the team is mechanical and one third is electrical. But that could be because we have it set up in that kind of fashion. We have three subgroups and 1 sub-subgroup. The three subgroups would be upper body, base, and controls, and the 1 sub-subgroup was programming which falls under controls. With this past year aside, we have always had more mechanical guys than electrical guys, just because it seems that there is a lot more freedom in mechanical as to how you can design parts and work with the robot.

The exception to this freedom lies this year, as the controls and programming divisions were officially split. This made controls smaller than it usually always is and on top of that this year, we decided to use Pro/E and Inventor to our max, and created a bunch of interesting mounting plates for both our brain and compressor. I am one of the ones on our team that sometimes utilizes a program that makes PCBs so on top of getting some creativity designing mechanical parts and laying out our brain on CAD, I get to design my own boards and stuff which gives me some space and creativity of my own on the electrical side.

I think that controls is near the same every year. Sure you have twists and turns, but the focus is the same every year and you are just improving yourself. With mechanical aspects you are redesigning the way things are done because every years game is different.

Pavan.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

The Mechanical Team has to be bigger, because they work for the first 5-1/2 weeks building.
The electrical and programming group only as the robot for a few days, so they can have a much smaller group.

i always assumed that was why the electrical and programming teams just wanted the robot for a few days, right at the end...... ;)

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Our team is fairly small with 18 people. Most do multiple jobs, such as Graphics and Mechanic. We have 6 mechanical, 2 electricians (one of which is vice pit chief) 2 of the mechanics are Graphics, and 2 of the mechanics where on the drive team, the other electrician was the human player. So we have 1 pure electrician and 2 pure mechanics, thoes who have no other jobs.

With a new wave of people next year there should be more seperation of sections, but the 3 teams (drive, mechanical, and electrical) should stick very close together.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Yeah really... I'm surprised no-one else has said anything...

Oh well. Guess it was a good topic:D

Jacob

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

At least you have people which want to do those, we have 3 people on our marketing team, i had to forcefully recruit those 2 (i'm the other)

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

At least he "searched" before posting! :) He deserves props for that. Isn't that what everybody preaches (myself included)?

Pavan.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Absolutely! I'm not complaining at all. I'm commending what he has done. I'm just saying that I'm surprised that noone else had made any other comments to this effect; The conversation continued as normal.

Jacob

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

Our electrical team was a small number of students (i want to say 2 or 3, but may have only been one), but in many ways was in the best shape because we had two GM engineers helping with the E board.

Mechanical was a lot larger, but they obviously dealt with a lot of things like electric motors and such.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

umm yea i was the only electrical... and pneumatics... and programming... and sometimes the weight hole person.

Re: Mechanical Vs Electrical
 

We had twelve people on the mechanical team this year, though nearly everyone else (myself included) has basic mechanical training and helps out as needed. The electrical team only had four members this year, and two of them are seniors. We hope that when we take on new members this May that some of them will be interested in electronics.

"Mechanical" for us is divided into two categories. We have students who are trained how to use specific machines (mill, welder, lathe, CNC, etc) and those who just know how to use the simpler machines (band saw, drill press, hand drill, grinder, sander, etc). NOBODY uses the table saw without an adult. About half of our mechanical team falls into this "special training" group, and the other half cuts basic parts and assembles the robot.