Crowd Source Robotics

[alecmuller]

FRC is perfect for crowd sourcing robot designs.

Think about it: we have thousands of teams that work at the same time on solving one problem, and we're allowed to reuse design elements from year to year as long as we've shared them.

I love the fact that hundreds of teams have already been sharing and building off each others' designs for years.

For new teams, however (who could arguably benefit the most from building on other teams' work), the amount of information and the way it's organized is overwhelming.

In your opinion, what are the best resources on the web for finding and sorting through different robot module options (especially during the franticness of build season)?

Personally I think the Chief Delphi Forum is an excellent "long term memory" for tracking shared designs, but it's not ideal for quickly finding downloadable tutorials and open sourced designs because it's much broader than just these two things, and you have to wade through a lot of other discussion to find them.

Do you know of people using social media or other tools to help crowd source robot designs? I've looked for groups out there but haven't found any yet (maybe I'm calling it something different than they are?), so I've started one here:

http://www.crowdsourcerobotics.org/robot-modules.html

If others are already working on this I'd love to join them, so I'd appreciate any help you can offer in helping me find them.

Thanks, and I look forward to meeting some of you at World's this week.
Sincerely,
Alec Muller
Mechanical Mentor Team 2342