Engineering journal

[Renegades2012]

Do the teams need to keep and engineering journal during the build season?

[EricH]

It is not required to do so in FRC. However, it may be helpful to your team to keep one or more.

[PayneTrain]

It is by no means a requirement, but I can't stress how much help documentation brings to a team (especially as a person who has had to bridge data gaps in the team by piecing together any information and anecdotal material he could find).

As a rookie team, I think that taking pictures of the robot, noting how you went about designing the robot, and pointing to its successes and failures can help your team in the offseason and in future seasons. This discipline of writing down these processes can carry over into sustainability plans, so you have more chances to build more robots and inspire more people.

[rachelholladay]

Our team does not keep one. However personally this year I am. I got a nice leather bound notebook and am trying to keep notes of everything that goes on. As head programmer, I hoping this will help me document my code. I think it would be really interesting to see other people's build notebook, if only to see how their team journeyed through the season.

[msimon785]

As everyone has said, it is by no means required. With that said, I have always used one and would not know what to do without it.
If you want a great investment, buy yourself a Maker's Notebook.
These are *fantastic* books with tons of reference material in the back.
Apart from an engineering journal, keep a binder with the manual and all the team updates. This is indispensable.

[Mongai]

An Engineering Notebook makes you look good in the eyes of the competition judges. So if you are planning on getting an award, think about getting together a notebook!

Need to? No

Fun to? Yes.

[Walter Deitzler]

We keep a journal. Last year we had too many set-backs due to people not knowing what had happened last meeting because they had missed a meeting. We have an engineering journal where we write down what we did last meeting and what we are planning to do next meeting. It keeps us knowing what is happening and is very useful.

[Renegades2012]

Thank you so much for the insight! I will start keeping one now!

[Tommy F.]

We haven't kept journals in previous years, but this year every sub-team leader has received one. What the captains of our team have done this year is they have each sub-team leader (CAD, Mechanical, Software) document what they did that certain day, then they have us carbon copy the page we wrote on and they tear out the copy and put it in a binder for future reference.

As the Software Lead, I don't really like having to do this, but I know it has a good purpose, and I'll most likely end up documenting what I do in the future, so I may as well start now.

[artdutra04]

In the real world, all engineers and designers use their engineering notebooks every day to record new ideas, notes, drawings/sketches, prototypes, tests/trials, data, and every other aspect of the engineering process.

While not required for FRC, it would be a great learning experience for teams to start and keep their own engineering notebooks to get into the right engineering mindset.

[DonRotolo]

^^ beat me to it.

For legal and patent reasons, most design engineers - particularly in large companies - are required to keep an engineering notebook. Get in the habit now, it'll help you.

[Mr. Pockets]

My freshman year I took to writing daily progress reports for the subgroup I was in. It was highly educational, and it made sure that everyone had a good understanding of where my project was.

I definitely recommend trying it, even if it's just a notepad file on the computer. Additionally, it's very helpful when going back to look for areas of improvement and the like.