80/20 questions
 

for my questions:
1. how has 80/20 worked for you in the past? what profiles have you used?

2. whats the best way to CAD it, We use inventor and my work uses sketchup and Autocad with AutoQuoterX, but when I use step files from 80/20 Inventor forces me to go through fusion to get the length I want.

Re: 80/20 questions
 

1. Is a pretty open ended question. There's no straightforward answer other then 'usually pretty well'. The teams that use it consistently tend to love it and do well with it, probably because they've learned techniques and tricks to make it work well. There are dozens of threads and whitepapers on the topic- just search for 80/20.

2. When I need to CAD up a 80/20 frame I'll use either Inventor or Solidworks weldment environment to generate the extrusions in whatever length I need using a 3d sketch as a template. At this point I have the profiles saved and ready to go, but I generated them by just starting a sketch on the end of a model I found online, projected the outline of the 80/20 file and saved the sketch as a weldment profile. I think the example profiles I used were right from the 80/20 website. It was pretty straightforward to do a couple years ago, I can't imagine much has changed.

What I'll more commonly do is just use a profile for a 1x1 or whatever square tube for the profile, rather then the specific 80/20 profile. This greatly cuts down on the filesize and memory requirements, and rarely sacrifices any functionality of the model. This only works when your not concerned about the physical properties of the model, like mass, CG, FEA stuff etc.

Re: 80/20 questions
 

80/20 is an awesome building material, though heavy, so it must be used wisely.

I used it on my high school team and the 4+ teams I mentored in college. We typically used the 1010lite series profile.

AS for the best way to cad it go here and you can download an actual part file for most CAD software and make it what ever length you want.

Re: 80/20 questions
 

Attached is a presentation on 80/20 I gave last month.

Re: 80/20 questions
 

1. My team has used 1x1 80/20 for as long as I've been with the team. The biggest advantage that it gives us is that we always have our robot done early due to the ease of assembly and lack of machining needed to build a robot from it. However, when using 80/20 our robots are always heavy and have flex problems.

If you look at any good robot made from 80/20 you'll see that they typically have some sort of two tier frame to overcome how flexible 80/20 is. While these robots frames are comparable in stiffness and strength to other build methods (tubing, sheet, etc...) they are much heavier.

I don't know if this thread is meant to discuss how to use 80/20, or to decide between using or not using 80/20. If its the latter, I recommend you use 80/20 for your frame only if you have extremely limited machining resources and you need construct your robot quickly and design as you go. There is no reason to use 80/20 for framing based on its performance as a frame member, it should only be used when you need its ease of assembly and lack of required machining.

2. I do everything 3d in inventor, I currently have inventor set up to use 80/20 in the frame generator. I downloaded all the 80/20 profiles I wanted of their site and made one ipart containing all the profiles, I authored that ipart as a frame member and published it to the content center. Its was a fairly irritating process that I did a long time ago and don't fully remember, if your want me to go into more detail let me know.

Re: 80/20 questions
 

Find your local 80/20 distributor and invite them to your team to show you how to use 80/20. They will be happy to come.

Re: 80/20 questions
 

This is good advice. (See Eric Curry's earlier post also, the attachment includes a great local contact if your team is near St. Louis.)

Also, look at the details (I love details) of a few Bomb Squad robots. They make very effective use of extrusion in ways that enable design tweaks. It's an element of a continuous improvement strategy -- which of course is one those things that differentiate teams that are competitive from teams that win.

Re: 80/20 questions
 

Well funny thing is im working for my local 80/20 distributor, Im doing design work for them so I have worked with the stuff for a while. I posted this to see the best option for my team because it might turn into me helping a lot more this year.