Quote:
Originally Posted by Knufire
My opinion is that CAD is a communication tool.
CAD helps you lay out your ideas and communicate them to other team members. CAD helps you better communicate your ideas to the more logical part of your brain and flush these ideas out in more detail. CAD will help you communicate to your manufacturing team exactly what parts you need made and communicate your assembly team where those parts go.
CAD, however, will not take bad ideas and turn them into good ones. CAD won't make up for deficiencies in the other areas of the team you're trying to communicate with. CAD won't make a plan for you, just give you a method to better communicate your plan to other.
Also, learning to CAD will not teach you to design. Just because something looks like it will work in CAD does not mean it will turn out the same in real life.
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Yes!
If one cannot communicate the design to others on the team, the design becomes unmanufacturable by anyone other than the person who drew the design. This usually means making manufacturing drawings for each and every non-COTS part.
We had two team members doing the CAD work on our robot this year. One of them covered the drivetrain, utility arm and collector mechanism. He spent many hours cutting all the parts for the drivetrain and utility arm on the team's mill and CNC router because he was also the only one on the team that knew how to use those tools. When the CAD of the collector was handed to other team members, he had to pull up his CAD and give them all sorts of dimensions for the lengths of the tubes and the locations of the holes. When they did not have a particular dimension, they either guessed or stopped until they could ask him for it.
My son did the CAD for the upper structure/bumper supports. I insisted he make manufacturing drawings for all the parts he created and post them on the team's Google Drive. Due to his school schedule he could not attend all the meetings. The manufacturing drawings allowed other team members to cut them out and drill all the holes without him present. Ultimately, he only put in about 10% of the effort needed to manufacture those part and only because no one was available to do the work on the day he was able to go to the build meeting.