What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

Does anybody know how many people use some sort of CAD software? I know that chief is a little biased but my team would still like to know.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

I haven't met many teams who don't use CAD.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

Try adding a poll to this thread. It will let you collect the data that you want

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

I'm the only one on my team who uses SolidWorks and attends meetings regularly, but we model everything up before building. Between the CAD work and some basic prototyping, we build every mechanism on our robot once this year and had no issues we weren't able to fix without rebuilding the mechanism. Is it necessary? No... but you better have the resources to build and rebuild things when something doesn't fit right.

I plan on holding a SolidWorks course for any of our students who are interested, and hopefully we'll be able to CAD up EVERYTHING on the robot next year. Not having time to plan out mounting holes or gussets was probably the biggest problem we had from the design side.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

There was another thread recently that posed a similar question about whether teams used CAD or whether CAD was essential.

The answer is: you can be a successful team and not use CAD. It is not essential. However, you can also build robots using just hand tools. Power tools are not essential. But of course they are extremely helpful and time saving.

(Hey, we made our robot with only a drill press and miter saw and hand tools. But, we also did use a lot of CAD :D )

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

Here is a poll to get this started

http://www.strawpoll.me/10245924


Results here.

http://www.strawpoll.me/10245924/r

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

I would suspect the vast majority of younger teams (0-3yrs) do not utilize CAD based on my observations.

Our team has used one form or another of CAD since about 2008, prior to that, one of our engineering mentors on the team would actually hand draw (in detail) robot components on plotter paper.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

My team just started thinking about CAD this year. We didn't do any more with it than get the software license from the KOP and think about it at the beginning of the season*. Next year we may use it more, but this year we did not.


*we did draw our arm to scale on paper before manufacturing it, that was a first for us.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

We use Inventor, 90% of our parts are made from a CAD drawing. Also, we use our CAD to direct our CNC mill. CAD is also used mainly on our team to find places where electronics, motors, and pneumatics fit. As a guess, I would say 75% of teams use CAD to help build their robot.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

If your team has access to (and uses) water jet, CNC manufacturing, or 3D printing, then CAD becomes a necessity.

If your hand building; CAD is not strictly necessary. But it helps with planning the robot configuration, and designing some sub components. Mechanical drafting seems to have become a lost skill, but is very useful for configuration development.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

My guess is that the majority of teams do not CAD.

CD polls are skewed towards more successful teams much farther than one would expect. Most low-performing teams don't have a connection to the greater FRC/FIRST community, and operate in isolation.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

Many FRC teams are also "participants" more than they are "competitors." But I think this trend is changing, especially with the growth of districts.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

I don't necessarily think a minority of teams do CAD, but it is definitely a smaller percentage of teams than the poll suggests.

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

Another aspect of this discussion which is emerging, is to what extent teams use CAD during their design process. I have seen teams that use CAD to make sure that things fit simply by modeling blocks that are roughly the shape of a mechanism, organizing the blocks and then saying "ok the shooter must be no bigger than the block" and so on.

There is a big difference between modeling a rectangular prism called, "electronics board" and placing individual electronics components.

There are also plenty of teams who model in every fastener, and every hole. As others have mentioned, this becomes more important when parts are being cut with CNC tools.

~DK

Re: What Percent of Teams Use CAD?
 

From what I have been told, 246 didn't start using CAD until 2015. Apparently they just ended up using their prototypes as the final product.

This year, we housed a rookie team in our lab for the later half of the split, and I saw that they didn't use CAD. This is mainly because their robot was just a modified kitbot with a 1 joint arm to help with defenses, so there really wasn't any need for it.