Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigHickman
Here's a good way to think about it: Would you trust yourself riding in a car you didn't do CAD for, and only sketched it roughly out?
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Hmmmm.....would that include my 55 Chevy? my son's 59 Chevy truck? My other son's 70 Camaro? My wife's 70 Dodge? I didn't design these, I did modify some of them. I know they weren't designed with modern technology, but short answer...yes, I would.
This year we have some students on the team who are enrolled in the new pre-engineering program at our local community college. This is a joint high school/college program. There hasn't been any integration of the classes with the robotics team, unfortunately...they seem to be in different worlds.
But one day, it might all come together, and we'll have a lot of students with CAD knowledge, and computer resources for them to use (all of the Inventor work we've done so far this year has been on a few older student owned laptops). We have no sponsors in the manufacturing business, and no CNC equipment, so the move to computer aided manufacturing is either in the future or just a pipe dream.
Even so, we did use Inventor quite a bit this year for our robot design, and revising the design. We did not do much in the way of using it for making design drawings, it ended up being easier to just make a dimensioned sketch on paper to make parts from.
I'm very impressed with how 217 and 148 and others have managed to get their design process so well organized. It's something we should all aspire to, as it reflects how things are done "right". I agree with Adam that it must be an amazing experience for the students!