[Holtzman]

I've been a big supporter of the 3d mouse for a while. I've got one at work, and one at home. With the basic Space Navigator, you only get two short cut keys on the 3d mouse itself. With the higher end 3d mice, you get a boat load more programmable shortcut keys. I rarely go back to the keyboard at all anymore.

At 2056, we use Solidworks(as well as in my professional life). I started off using Inventor years ago, but switched and never looked back.

I've never been a big fan of multiple designers on the same project. You really need clearly defined limitations and interfaces if you are going to have different designers designing different sub assemblies on the robot.

It's been my experience that the vast majority of teams don't use CAD software to drive their design. Most teams lack a competent enough designer to really get the most out of their CAD Software.

Unless you have the manufacturing capabilities to get parts fabricated with an extremely quick turn around time, you really don't have weeks and weeks to play with the CAD model.

So what am I really trying to say? Don't waste too much time struggling with a CAD package for the sake of drawing it beforehand if you're not competent enough with the software to really get the full benefit of it. Sometimes you just need to make the part. That being said, if you are an experienced user, I really believe CADing the entire robot is hugely beneficial... if you don't have to spend weeks doing it.

Our typical timeline goes something like this. By the Wednesday of week 1, we finalize the conceptual design. By the Wednesday of week 2, the full robot model is "done", and we start fabrication. I say "done", because we all know that things always change as the season goes on, but the model always gets updated with these changes. We always make changes between ship and regionals or Championship. Having an accurate and updated model makes planning for changes much easier, and when we do unbag the robot, the upgraded mechanisms or parts fit the first time, and don't require a ton of fiddling to get running.

Why do we push so hard to have a model done by the middle of week 2? We currently don't have access to resources to get really quick turn around time on parts. We also like to have a practice robot running by the end of week 3, or early week 4. So to fit all this in, we need to have drawings out by the middle of week 2. If at some point, we do secure faster machining resources, we will push back our design release accordingly.