What Percent of Teams Use CAD?

[C.Lesco]

Does anybody know how many people use some sort of CAD software? I know that chief is a little biased but my team would still like to know.

[Jay O'Donnell]

I haven't met many teams who don't use CAD.

[Eric Scheuing]

I'm the only one on my team who uses SolidWorks and attends meetings regularly, but we model everything up before building. Between the CAD work and some basic prototyping, we build every mechanism on our robot once this year and had no issues we weren't able to fix without rebuilding the mechanism. Is it necessary? No... but you better have the resources to build and rebuild things when something doesn't fit right.

I plan on holding a SolidWorks course for any of our students who are interested, and hopefully we'll be able to CAD up EVERYTHING on the robot next year. Not having time to plan out mounting holes or gussets was probably the biggest problem we had from the design side.

[GreyingJay]

There was another thread recently that posed a similar question about whether teams used CAD or whether CAD was essential.

The answer is: you can be a successful team and not use CAD. It is not essential. However, you can also build robots using just hand tools. Power tools are not essential. But of course they are extremely helpful and time saving.

(Hey, we made our robot with only a drill press and miter saw and hand tools. But, we also did use a lot of CAD )

[orangemoore]

Here is a poll to get this started

http://www.strawpoll.me/10245924


Results here.

http://www.strawpoll.me/10245924/r

[cbale2000]

I would suspect the vast majority of younger teams (0-3yrs) do not utilize CAD based on my observations.

Our team has used one form or another of CAD since about 2008, prior to that, one of our engineering mentors on the team would actually hand draw (in detail) robot components on plotter paper.

[maxnz]

My team just started thinking about CAD this year. We didn't do any more with it than get the software license from the KOP and think about it at the beginning of the season*. Next year we may use it more, but this year we did not.


*we did draw our arm to scale on paper before manufacturing it, that was a first for us.

[scott.smith]

We use Inventor, 90% of our parts are made from a CAD drawing. Also, we use our CAD to direct our CNC mill. CAD is also used mainly on our team to find places where electronics, motors, and pneumatics fit. As a guess, I would say 75% of teams use CAD to help build their robot.

[InFlight]

If your team has access to (and uses) water jet, CNC manufacturing, or 3D printing, then CAD becomes a necessity.

If your hand building; CAD is not strictly necessary. But it helps with planning the robot configuration, and designing some sub components. Mechanical drafting seems to have become a lost skill, but is very useful for configuration development.

[Knufire]

My guess is that the majority of teams do not CAD.

CD polls are skewed towards more successful teams much farther than one would expect. Most low-performing teams don't have a connection to the greater FRC/FIRST community, and operate in isolation.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Knufire

My guess is that the majority of teams do not CAD.

CD polls are skewed towards more successful teams much farther than one would expect. Most low-performing teams don't have a connection to the greater FRC/FIRST community, and operate in isolation.

Many FRC teams are also "participants" more than they are "competitors." But I think this trend is changing, especially with the growth of districts.

[ASD20]

Originally Posted by Knufire

My guess is that the majority of teams do not CAD.

CD polls are skewed towards more successful teams much farther than one would expect. Most low-performing teams don't have a connection to the greater FRC/FIRST community, and operate in isolation.

I don't necessarily think a minority of teams do CAD, but it is definitely a smaller percentage of teams than the poll suggests.

[DinerKid]

Another aspect of this discussion which is emerging, is to what extent teams use CAD during their design process. I have seen teams that use CAD to make sure that things fit simply by modeling blocks that are roughly the shape of a mechanism, organizing the blocks and then saying "ok the shooter must be no bigger than the block" and so on.

There is a big difference between modeling a rectangular prism called, "electronics board" and placing individual electronics components.

There are also plenty of teams who model in every fastener, and every hole. As others have mentioned, this becomes more important when parts are being cut with CNC tools.

~DK

[DaveL]

In the past, I have used Visio for space claim, intake design and pneumatic cylinder length and placement analysis. We even had a company laser cut a support based on a Visio file. A few students have learned Visio. Its a great 2D tool that can be learned by most students in under an hour and Microsoft has agreements with many school districts for free software.

We are also getting students trained up in Solidworks. This spring we designed a simple product and then 3D printed it. We are moving toward our goal of designing the entire robot before construction.

If you create a survey, some of the things to ask might include:
Years in FIRST?
Have a CAD mentor on the team?
How large is your team (active students)?
What do you use CAD for? (Multiple Selection)
- 3D printing
- Custom frame design
- CNC milling
- Transmission design
- Space Claim
- Overall robot design
- Wire routing
- Other

How did your team get up to speed?
- Books
- Videos
- Mentors
- Help from another team
- Other

Which CAD product do you use?
- Solidworks
- Autodesk
- Visio
- PowerPoint
- ProE
- Creo
- Other

Dave

[smitikshah]

We have decided to really use CAD this year.

Last season a couple people tried to use sketchup to CAD the actual bot but the robot didn't end up working. For the offseason we really got serious and used SW which really helped the team - so if the main design person/captain was not there that day build team still had all the dimensions and an idea of the bot. It also allowed less dedicated members to know how they could help out in cutting/building when they decided to swing by the lab.

In addition, with CADing the entire bot this year, we were able to create an engineering notebook for future generations of the team with all the individual parts and final assembly. Each part (with CAD rendering) and an explanation of why we decided to go with that design hopefully will help future generations make tough design decisions choices.

All in all, CAD was super beneficial to use for our team, helped us all stay on the same page, and helped us not waste too much time with days on end of prototyping. Definitely recommend!

(Plus if you get things specially cut - we get some aluminium pieces waterjet cut - you would absolutely need it!)