The build schedule: how do you guys do it?

[DampRobot]

This is a great start. Having a schedule is an awesome way of making build season run more smoothly, and in the end getting more out of it.

We are a team of about 30 students (with a core group of about 10-15) and meet about 5-7 days a week for 3 hours (more on weekends). We have a CNC mill, a manual lathe, a band saw, and a drill press. We do not use sponsor to machine parts for us, for reasons involved with the culture and mission of the team. We CAD the robot extensively before building in Autodesk Inventor.

This year, the leaders put out a schedule which the mechanics team managed to keep very on top of. We finished conceptual design by mid week one, had a fully CADed robot Monday of week two, finished the practice bot Sunday of week three, and had a fully functioning competition and practice robot about Saturday of week six. Certain elements of the robot (especially the shooter) were delayed and suffered in performance because of it, but the vast majority of the robot was finished on this schedule.

In your schedule , you budgeted about a week for "conceptual design." Would this include prototyping? Talking to many "elite" teams, I learned that many spend several weeks making good, useful prototypes, that allow them to learn about the ins and outs of various designs before building a full up mechanism. Just deciding on a drivetrain and strategy probably should not take a week. Getting good effective prototypes might take much longer.

In your schedule, you mentioned that you want to CAD the robot. Awesome! CAD is one of the tools that separates the professional looking teams from those that look hacked together. Used correctly, it will streamline your design process, and make you more efficient during the whole build season. However, CAD is very hard (and boring) to learn, and even harder to use correctly during build season. If no one on your team knows how to CAD, I recommend that you and several other highly committed members start learning immediately. Design something over the summer. The experience will allow CAD to be a help, not a hindrance, during build season.

It looks like your detailed design phase could be accelerated a bit, depending on how detailed you plan to make the CAD and how much experience your team has. Also, you should order parts as soon as you might think you might need them. Suppliers like AndyMark and BaneBots tend to get inundated during build season, and ship relativity slowly. Even suppliers like SDP-SI and McMaster might take more than a week to ship. Even if you don't have the drive train fully CADed, but you know you will need 6 inch performance wheels and Toughboxes, you can order them day three in order to receive them by week three. Don't wait to order if you don't have to.

Your build phase seems surprisingly short. Although it depends on your resources and how heavily you rely on sponsors, I think build deserves at least a week more. Especially because you are a second-year team, there will be some nasty surprises when you try to build the robot. You will probably be required to re-machine or even re-design systems. I would strongly advise against machining too late.

Finally, you have a week of programming and driver practice at the end. This is not only a good thing to have in and of itself, but a good amount of time to budget for running over on some other part of the process. We learned the hard way this year that programmers need to keep it simple. Yes, everyone always hears that, but there's a tendency, especially in programmers, to be overly ambitious. I would recommend enforcing a fair amount of time dedicated solely to driver practice. Time practicing with the robot always improves performance, time programming the robot can be wasted on overly ambitious projects.

Good luck next build season. Having a well thought out schedule that everyone commits to will give you a huge advantage.

[372 lives on]

I see one thing to add to that schedule. Prototyping. Mostly through weeks 1-2.

1) >10
2) Everyone designs it. mechanical/electrical/programming. we let people pick what they want to do.
3) day one/two we decided on the general layout of the robot and start building a base( usually make some small changes later)
4) unfortunately we can only us cads on students personal laptops. so only 1 person the last two years. Hopefully the entire mechanical team( and whoever else wants to learn to CAD) will be doing it next year.
3) when i was a driver i would get excused from class to go drive the robot if i wasn't taking a test..

[F22Rapture]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. To address a few things:

Originally Posted by DampRobot

In your schedule , you budgeted about a week for "conceptual design." Would this include prototyping?.

As a 2nd year team, we still have very little funding. Hopefully this should change this year as we have a few prospective companies that we're talking with, but this year we had absolutely no money for prototypes. Our entire robot was built on $400, and after that and a single regional we were in the hole $700. Like I said, we're working on that.

I'll be taking a solidworks class this summer, and trying to convince other team members to do the same. The only others on our team who are proficient with CAD are mentors, so this will definitely be a good thing.

Originally Posted by DampRobot

Your build phase seems surprisingly short. Although it depends on your resources and how heavily you rely on sponsors, I think build deserves at least a week more. Especially because you are a second-year team, there will be some nasty surprises when you try to build the robot. You will probably be required to re-machine or even re-design systems. I would strongly advise against machining too late.

Thank you.



Most of our team members are homeschooled, as we are a 4H team unattached to a high school. As such while you would think it would be easier to get together, it's much more difficult because we're from all across the county. We're also a small team (~15 students). Hopefully we can do some heavy recruiting to make this less of an issue.