Is CAD essential to all teams?

[waterbott]

Hey Johns Creek! Its nice to see you guys on Chief Delphi. PM me, I might be able to help you guys out with getting started with CAD.

For us, CAD serves as both a tool and a supplement to design; however, it is important to remember that the quality of design through CAD can only be as good as the users. Our team has been successful without CAD before; however, the quality of design depended highly on having a solid understanding of the mechanics behind the design. In many ways CAD serves a a crutch as it helps us visualize some design problems before they are built; however, without a solid understanding of mechanics, CAD can only help so much.

For our team, we started recently started the process of designing with CAD first before building it. We've had a mixture of successes and failures from this approach. For example, one thing we noticed is that because many of the members dedicated to CAD had little background working in fabrication and assembly, we weren't "designing for manufacturability", meaning that we created designs that were either too complicated to fabricate or difficult to assemble. The convenience of CAD made us overlook some of these problems. One of the successes we had with CAD is that it let us lay out the design before it was built and archive an analyze and changes we make. It proved to be an invaluable tool for visualization as well as easing the fabrication process.

Conclusion to this rambling? Having a successful robot primarily predicates on having a foundational understanding of what you are building, CAD serves as a tool that can only be as good as the person who wields it.