JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

Hi Everyone,
Last fall I posted a challenge to teams to record and post their design process.
Now... I've got another challenge for you...

I'd like to see you post your designs.

Publicly. For everyone to see.
I'm not talking about one grainy camera-phone picture of your robot. I'm not talking about a CAD render of a drivetrain you'll never build.
I'm talking about posting details on robots and mechanisms your team USED in competition.

I started doing this 2 years ago. Ideally I would have done a detailed writeup for each of our robots, but I didn't even take that much effort. All I did was clean up our robot CAD Assembly a little bit, export a STEP file, and throw it up on Chief Delphi. I've been doing this ever since...

FRC148 - 2008 Robot Assembly - "Tumbleweed"
FRC148 - 2009 Robot Assembly - "Tornado"
FRC148 - 2010 Robot Assembly - "Armadillo"
FRC148 - 2011 Robot Assembly - "Raptor"

Now I know not everyone has full robot CAD assemblies. I know not everyone has full designs to share. That doesn't matter -- share whatever you can. Put it up there; someone will appreciate it...

I've been shocked by some of the comments 148 has received since we started publishing our models. The simplest thing can have the biggest impact. I had no idea the small stuff that people would thank us for, the little things that would help bring a designer to the next level.

There is no textbook out there on "how to design an elite FIRST robot." I remember the frustrations I felt when I when I was teaching myself about robot design, the best thing I had was a gallery of pictures on the (now mostly defunct) firstrobotics.net site and a whitepaper from Andy Baker about strapping a servo to a Bosch drill to make it shift. I could only DREAM of seeing details on some of the designs I admired so much.

I thought it was very cool that they made the "Behind the Design" books of 2006 and 2007. It was a neat thing to see teams turning to these for inspiration at the start of this season.
Reusing a design -- not going to help you much.
Reverse engineering then improving? Now THAT is powerful stuff.

I wish we had "Behind the Design" books for every season, but we don't.
We need to share this information in a different way. We need to give budding designers more examples they can re-engineer, because it's going to help them jump to the next level as designers.

Take a few minutes and post some details -- you'll be doing your part to raise the competitive level for all of us. A stronger competition will help fulfill the mission we're all working towards.

All I can think about is the punk kid sitting in his room wondering: "how'd 217's arm work like that? I wish I could get a closer look."
Let the kid take a closer look... :)

-John

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

Awesome challenge. I'll get our full CAD up as soon as possible. Until then, our entire season still exists on our blog.

While it may not be a published book, maybe members of the community could get together and compile a document in the same style and format as "Behind the Design" that could be distributed as a free PDF?

Just an idea. I'd love to help out with such a project if possible.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

Our design guide has been up on our website since the end of the build. You can find it here:

http://525swartdogs.org/pages/CAD/2011CAD.html

I tried to upload a high resolution version of it to CD-Media but it came up empty - not sure why. I try again in a day or so if it doesn't show up.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

I don't harbor any illusions that people are going to knock each other over to see our creation - we were unofficially 5-5-1 at our only 2011 regional - but we're proud of our design, proud of where we're going, and I'm not one to back down from a challenge.
CAD, pics, and a look at our thought process can be found on our blog. Hopefully it can serve as an inspiration to somebody on the simple use of COTS items and a peek into our strategizing, such as it is.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

Challenge Accepted:
Team 33 Buzz16 2011 Robot Design posted here
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2515

Enjoy.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

CAD model has already been posted here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2486

And dozens of technical photos of the final design are posted here: http://www.team228.org/media/pictures/2011

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=92753

I originally posted back in February and quite a few things have changed since then, so I added some more photos and explained the changes that were made.


Enjoy!

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

Fairly positive that John's point was to post up the CAD files for your designs. CAD can teach students what the pictures merely show.

I'm not sure how useful the CAD from 3553's robot would be to other teams, but I'll have JJ post up the file sometime if anyone would like.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

I wish more teams used Inventor...Or we used Solidworks!

In any case, I'll post a CAD of our robot for viewing at some point, but it might be tricky; Inventor files are quite large for the data they hold, so the master cad of our robot is about 100 mb.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

I think 525's detailed analysis was more helpful than any unexplained CAD model would be. Is there really anything there you can't get?

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

No I can understand it just fine Chris, they posted great captions with the images, but I think the post was meant to have teams post their files.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

If you convert it to a STEP file, you shouldn't have an issue with loading it into any modern CAD application. I believe the files are also significantly smaller if you export the whole assembly as a STEP.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

I don't believe this is still the case but i remember that all the inventor submission were posted on FIRST base and i use to download them and spent many hours looking how teams approached a problem differently then myself. I dont believe that Autodesk still does this but they might in future season if some one was to ask. I will talk to my current team to see if i can release our full cad for this year.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

You miss the hardcore detailed design though, which is what some people are really interested in looking at.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

Somewhere I think we still have some of the napkins and old envelopes we sketched our design on.....

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

CD-Media is not being my friend right now... Will try again tomorrow, might have to post external links.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

Finally got Team 2175's CAD up at http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2556. So far just the 3D pdf, STEP and native Solidworks assembly to follow whenever my internet works better.

Re: JVN Challenge: Post your Designs!
 

For some reason I waited until now to do this... but I'm still having issues with the upload, so I've uploaded the files to https://netfiles.umn.edu/users/siekm...red/2011Robot/.