CAD Intergration

[Ed Law]

Originally Posted by 1683cadder

How do you intergrate CAD more into the design process? Currently in the team I am on despite having a dedicated cad team (3-6 people) we can never seem to CAD before the build team actually builds. In a few situations, it ends up we have a design and the build team takes some inspiration from it, rarely do we design something that the build team actually uses, and most of the time we end up cadding after they build. I think I have come up with a list of problems:
2. How do we work with the build team more? Currently, the build team is not very interested in what we are doing and spends a lot of time prototyping on their own. How do we get them more involved in what we're doing?

It does not sound like your team is using resources intelligently. Do you have adult mentors on your team, one for CAD and one for Build? Is your team student run with no engineers involved? A team that is made up of students only can still be successful but there needs to be a project manager in charge of the overall project. The whole team should decide what the robot should do, not the build team. I think your team needs to define roles and responsibilites of all sub-groups. The CAD team's job is to transform the design concept the team agreed on into a working robot on the computer through detailed design of its components. The build team's job is just to fabricate parts and assemble based on the CAD model that has been virtually checked for interference, kinematics, weight, center of gravity etc.

We CAD our robot 100% before we make parts, usually around Week 3.