Custom West-Coast Design Feedback

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

I totally get what you mean. I make sure that whenever we use COTS parts, everything is put in CAD and treated as if it were a custom part that we designed, sketched, extruded, mated, and assembled ourselves. The only difference between the CAD and the real part is that we buy the real part, we don't make all of it (though like in the case with the versatubing, we do machine parts of it ourselves, but all machining is already included in the CAD model). This method allows our students to learn as much as possible as if we designed the part ourselves, but still have the ease of use, reliability, and time saving advantages that a COTS component normally has, like Adam previously mentioned.

COTS parts can be very expensive for teams to just dish out the money on off the shelf solutions. I know many teams who operate under having unlimited access to aluminum stock (tubing, sheets, blocks, etc) or other materials and limited budgets that push them to instead focus on making their custom parts and save the money on the upper assemblies.

Another downside of relying on COTS as we saw this past year is when the supplier has issues delivering or keeping up with demand. Obviously some of what happened was out of VexPro's control but its a risk teams face.

If a team wants to devote more of their time to machining over buying similar parts more power to them. Some of us might not agree if its the most time efficient manner to build a robot but that is their choice as a team since we all accomplish the game differently and seek to gain different lessons from participating in the program.

If the OP and team want to make a fully custom WCD in the off-season to try new design and build techniques go for it if that's how they feel they want to spend their off-season. I happen to remember your team did something similar last year Andrew.