Classes on Designing/Building Fundamentals?

[Potato]

Hey!

Our team is somewhat new, and this year we have a fairly large dearth of experience - last year, everybody but a few returning seniors and one junior on our team was new to FIRST, and we didn't have a system in place to educate new members.

As a consequence, during the build season, we were unable to get very involved in the design process - we just gave our mentors general ideas of what we wanted to build (i.e, a scissor lift), and they worked out all of the specifics (i.e. setting up our electronics and positioning our motors to actuate our lift) for us and told us what to build, which seemed pretty unfair to our mentors.

To remedy this, we're planning on holding classes on basic design and building before this year's build season begins. However, we're not exactly sure of what we should try to learn to become capable of being more involved in the designing/building process. Do you guys have any recommendations?

Thanks!

[JB987]

There are a lot of great sources of info right here on CD. Check "White Pages" link on left of portal webpage for a start. Also might want to use the link to AndyMark on same page to go to their website where there is a link to some great Powerpoints on design, etc... For that matter, lots of great tutorials, etc, on Youtube as well.

[Andrew Schreiber]

I just want to emphasize a few points that I found particularly interesting in this post...

Originally Posted by Potato

As a consequence, during the build season, we were unable to get very involved in the design process - we just gave our mentors general ideas of what we wanted to build (i.e, a scissor lift), and they worked out all of the specifics (i.e. setting up our electronics and positioning our motors to actuate our lift) for us and told us what to build, which seemed pretty unfair to our mentors.

I absolutely love your attitude that build/design should be a partnership between mentors and students.

Originally Posted by Potato

To remedy this, we're planning on holding classes on basic design and building before this year's build season begins. However, we're not exactly sure of what we should try to learn to become capable of being more involved in the designing/building process. Do you guys have any recommendations?

Thanks!

Wait... so you saw a problem and you are trying to fix it? AMAZING! Thank you, 1000 times thank you.

As was suggested, check out the white papers. Also consider partnering with another local team and sharing training. It might be that your team is short on programming knowledge but has considerable knowledge in how to effectively wire a robot. Share those resources among teams and gain their knowledge and experience too. An FRC team is not an island, we can't stand alone.

[rsisk]

By far the best time you can spend learning the design process from JVN:

http://thinktank.wpi.edu/article/156

I share this with my designers at work whenever they need a quick pick me up. Works just as well for software as it does for robot-ware/

[Potato]

Thanks for all the advice! It helped immensely, especially the white papers.