[Ken Zaballos]

Skunk Works Robotics (FRC Team 1983) successfully used dropbox with Inventor last year.

Among its major benefits: it’s free, available to everyone, the school does not block access, and it keeps a back up of everything. The initial 500MB space seems to be adequate for our needs.

Its major drawback is that it is not a library system. A student can overwrite another student’s work if they are not careful. You must be mindful of part names. If the student responsible for the “Arm Assembly” calls something a “Bracket” and the student responsible for the “Claw Assembly” also calls something a “Bracket”, there can be a conflict the next time the model is opened. If two students have the same part or assembly open at the same time, the person who saves last “wins”. You must be disciplined and communicate. Keep your folder hierarchy organized and it will be easier to manage the design.

Everyone must use the same project file. On our team, the student design lead created the project on dropbox and then had everyone else on the design team “browse” for it when they created a project on their personal and/or school computers. As long as you use that project file, you can use any computer anywhere and everything ends up in the right place. That is very convenient when working from both home and school.

As a mentor, I could see dropbox updates in real time while I am sitting at home. It was satisfying to know the students were hard at work. I could also view student work, take screen shots and post feedback on our OneNote document at any time. This kept progress steady and directed. If I wanted to look at a student’s part or assembly without creating a “.lck” file, I created a new assembly and placed their part or assembly in it. I was able to study, measure, and understand what the designer was doing without inadvertently saving over their work or preventing them from working.

We never had any fatal model corruption problems. There can be a significant delay in updating dropbox. Be sure an update is complete before you open/save your model. You will see the rotating update icon in the system tray. You can get what appears to be a corruption when you don’t wait for the update to complete. We did go back and retrieve older versions of models that dropbox created automatically. That feature was a life saver.

Overall, we were happy with dropbox. It isn’t perfect, but it is better than thumb drives (2011-2013). If we have to, we will use dropbox again or maybe Autodesk360. We hope to have a server with Vault this year, however.

Good luck!

Oh yeah, I mentioned OneNote. It is also free and is a fantastic documentation and communication tool. We use it for design communication/project management throughout the year.