Cad Team Questions

[Katie_UPS]

My current rookie team is kinda DNA with this, but my high school team had a CAD team of one student (yours truely) and a mentor. We also had 12 kids on the roster, with a core of about 4-5 kids, so the numbers might scale a little bit.

1.) How many kids are on your CAD team?
One kid (and one mentor). The student CADed drive train and arm/claw, while the mentor did the lift (2011).

2.)When do you complete the whole robot by?
As soon as we can. The drivetrain was done in a weekend after the final choice so that production could start. The lift took about a week-ish, and the claw about a week and a half.

We made final robot choices at the end of week 1 for drive train, and by the end of week 2 for the rest of the robot.

3.) What do you use for transferring files from different computers do you have a data base or something so all computers can access the files?
We used flash drives and a different mentors computer was the hub of all the CAD files. I don't really recommend this.

Dropbox is a pretty good internet-based file sharing system, but that has size limitations (2 gigs).

I believe that Inventor Vault was created for file sharing, but I'm not entirely certain.

4.) What is your CAD schedule? Like when is your deadline for everything completed ?
We didn't really have a deadline, partially because with such a small group it wasn't really a problem of someone slacking off. We got everything done as soon as we could, and really didn't waste time (to the extent that I would sit in my friends chemistry class during my free period so that I could CAD on his laptop)...

It should be noted that how long you have to CAD really depends on your building resources. Teams like 217 and 148, who can almost literally "print" a robot (they are the first two I could think of) can afford to spend more time prototyping and CADing, whereas teams with little more than a drill press will need more time to build.