[techtiger1]

Originally Posted by ChrisH

I can just imagine what would happen if somebody at the company I work for showed up at a major design review and showed a pencil and paper sketch of a new system. Not only would the customer laugh us out of the room, but the idiot who pulled that would be fired or at least found a very special "special assignment". So yes you really should be moving from Inventor to reality.

But that leaves out the pencil sketching stage. Inventor or any CAD system can be cumbersome to use in meetings. Any Mechanical worth their salt can walk up to a white board or whip out pencil and paper and do a rough sketch. These sketches can be either flat views or isometrics. You should be able to do both as required. If you can't then I suggest you take a drafting class or at least an art class that includes perspective drawing and learn how. Start with pencil and paper sketches before you CAD.

This stage is for a gross feasibility and to get the idea fixed in your mind. Then you go out and sketch it up in Inventor. You move from undetailed rough models to finer and finer models. For example when designing a robot frame I'll typically represent the drive train with a large "keep out zone" that accounts for the chain path, gearboxes, and wheels. Our spiral ball holder was a big cylinder, etc. If you are just trying to figure out what goes where you don't necessarily need a lot of fine detail.

Once you start to get a sense of the relations of things then you start figuring out how big they should be, whether you need shaft collars and other fine details. Figuring out these details is where CAD excells. I should also point out that CAD used properly gives you the ability to iterate a design two or three times before you start building hardware. Every iteration should improve your design. It also gives you a real good idea what you part should look like and where you should put the holes. The better idea you have what you are building, the faster and more accurately you can build it. Rarely will we have to redo a part that is fabricated correctly in the first place if we CADed it before building it. Not having to redo things two or three times to get them to fit is a great timesaver.

This method does require some discipline. It is easy to go out and just build something. The hard part is figuring out how to build the RIGHT thing.

Enough said. Oh yeah happy Birthday Chris. Yes inventor to reality is a big part of 1251's design process everything we do is in inventor first we could easily recreate this years robot with the drawings we have.