[Brandon Holley]

You've asked some good questions because it means you are thinking about these issues ahead of time and can plan accordingly.

Every team's design cycle is different, and it is important to recognize what works for one team, may have disastrous results on your own.

For us, we CAD ~90% of the robot before we start cutting anything for the final robot. This requires a huge chunk of time to accomplish, and if you are waiting for the robot design to be almost completely finished, it means you are also not making any strives in the physical realm toward completing the robot.

For that tradeoff however, you end up with a very well thought out plan (the CAD model) of the robot and can attack accordingly. As the drivetrain is finished up in design, we will start buying all the necessary components and raw materials for the drive. Ditto the various mechanisms and electrical systems.

We have a 'design' subteam that's main focus is the design of the robot. To facilitate us getting to a "building" mode faster, the design team kicks some serious a** in the early weeks of the build season. Late late nights, meeting everyday, sharing designs online when we aren't together, a lot of hard work. This allows us to get the design done quicker, which lets us start building faster.

I should mention, that along the way here we typically have a couple prototype teams who are building, breaking, improving and re-breaking prototype mechanisms. Their findings are constantly being fed back into the design team. Often times, a few mechanisms will solidify before others. For instance in 2011, the drivetrain and elevator designs were complete within a week and a half. Meanwhile, the claw and minibot teams were continuing to iterate and iterate and iterate.

We actually showed up to the scrimmage in Suffield, CT with a completely different claw than what we ended up with in our regionals (this was week 6 of build season). The results on the field were not up to our standard we had set, so we decided to hit SolidWorks again and crank out an entirely different design.

Like I said above, what works for us, may not work at all for your team. We know what types of components can be completed quickly for us and what others will be a huge time-suck. Think about your strengths and weaknesses, think about how CAD can help enhance those strengths and minimize those weaknesses.

Good luck!
-Brando