Is CAD essential to all teams?

[waialua359]

CAD is essential to our team because I hate wasting material and eyeball engineering.

[indieFan]

The wheel was designed back in 2003, I believe. I do not have any copies of the design. Is it possible? Probably, but not cleanly on a 3-axis machine with the tools that we had available per the Professor whose lab it was in.

[Michael Blake]

Originally Posted by waialua359

CAD is essential to our team because I hate wasting material and eyeball engineering.

AND it certainly eliminates the "insert magic" phase of building a bot.

Example: "How we gonna mount the motor/gearbox to move that turret?" "We'll just see how it looks after we build the tower and TA-DA 'insert magic'"

NOPE. Doesn't work.

LOL ;-)

--Michael Blake

[Sid323]

As a CAD team member of Team 1683 (your friendly neighbors), we would have no problem helping your team with learning SolidWorks in a robotics context. Email me at sidharth.potdar@gmail.com and we can discuss plans if you want.

[EricH]

I would consider that CAD is essential to all teams. However, I do not necessarily consider Computer Aided Design essential to all teams.




CAD may also be Cardboard Aided Design, Crayon Aided Design, or Coffee Aided Design. I suggest avoiding the latter late at night, though--you need your sleep, and nobody really knows if it works.


What I'm getting at is that you don't have to use the computer to make your designs. You will want to do scale models or drawing of some form, and CAD can make those much easier. But, as others have noted, CAD is merely a tool. Witness: this thread.

Personally, I'm partial to using good ol' pencil and paper on occasion, at least for concept drawings. And I have been known to use Microsoft Publisher (and/or PowerPoint and/or Paint) as a CAD program. No joke.

[abhishekmalle]

Ok, ok. So I'm getting the general feel here. CAD isn't absolutely needed for a successful team and could maybe be postponed till we actually have a mentor of some sort.

To the teams that CAD:

-Is the entire robot done in CAD before the manufacturing process begins? Or is there more of a rolling system where the robot is built as the CAD is completed?

-How much of that aforementioned planning is actually useful or are you just going through the motions?

-How do you go about generating interest for CAD? At least at my school, people don't exactly turn their heads at the prospect of joining robotics to CAD.

-How many people does it take to have a reasonably sized CAD team?

To the teams that don't usually CAD:

-Do you still have the entire robot planned out on paper (including dimensions) before manufacturing?

-How much of that aforementioned planning is actually useful or are you just going through the motions?

-Are there any specific build season procedures that you go through that have helped you in the absence of CAD.


I just realized how many times I used "CAD" in this post.

[sdcantrell56]

Hey there. We are in the metro area as well although not quite neighbors. Our robot is entirely designed in CAD before machining. Almost nothing on the robot was fabricated without a CAD design as well as design review with at least one mentor. Part of this is because most of our fabrication is by CNC equipment, but also because we don't like wasting material or man hours on something that won't fit or work properly.

Using CAD will absolutely help you. It will not; however, be a revolutionary change without the knowledge to back it up. I recommend the most important step you can take is finding at least one engineering mentor, preferably a couple with different skill sets. I might even know of one who wouldn't mind helping out sometimes (PM me for details). The next biggest thing is learning how to analyze the game and decide what the important tasks are and what are tasks that you can reliably accomplish with your resources. This one is tough because you have to realistically assess your teams abilities and resources. Trying to do everything this year was pretty much unrealistic for most teams, especially teams in Georgia. Not being harsh, just reality.

Would love to talk more about it, so feel free to message me. We can maybe even set up some time to come down to Westminster to see how we work.

[GeeTwo]

If you have a sponsor or in-house workshop that is just waiting on your CAD to crank out beautifully worked pieces, and you aren't CADding yet, then absolutely CAD should be on your short list of talents to develop. If your machining is done in-house on a drill press or chop saw, then you have a real question as to whether CADding your robot design would be an improvement. The bottom line is that CAD is a tool whose real value is dependent on your team's other manufacturing capabilities; your team may or may not be ready to improve its processes based on CAD.

[Creepy97]

This was the first year that i was told that we CADed before we made the robot and from what i could tell we all knew what to do alot more than last year.

CAD is useful!

This was sent to me by one of my teams mentors for learning CAD on my own.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...theHaNQWxNA5yT

[Charles Boehm]

Our shopmates 3130 haven't used CAD to model their robots or mechanisms for at least the last four years. Anyone who follows Minnesota's top team's knows that they have been quite successful without it. Evidently not essential, but our team finds it pretty great. Especially because we can build up relationships with sponsors making us cool fancy parts

[pmangels17]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

-snip-
Don't be afraid to design only parts or subsystems of your robot first [in CAD]-- you don't need to just into the deep end.
-snip-

bold added for clarification.

This is also quite true. Designing an entire robot in CAD might not be a feasible or efficient solution for your team. However, stuff like the paper-template-to-make-gussets technique, which requires CAD, could definitely prove useful to a team trying to manufacture more accurately. Also, even rough sketches to find correct geometries or to make sure everything will fit in the space you want can be a huge help to robot construction. Additionally, this will help you get your feet wet and give you real experience with CAD during build season, while at the same time making sure that if CAD is not a solution for your team, you haven't invested so much time in it that other design approaches will no longer work.

[ASD20]

It definitely is possible to learn CAD well enough for FRC in the offseason. As the design lead of my team this year, I had to lead the CAD of our robot and had no real CAD experience prior to last Summer (unless you count SketchUp). So, over the summer, I taught myself to use inventor. I learned a lot from doing that and I have a few pieces of advice on how to do this. I am not a CAD expert, but rather an expert on being a complete CAD rookie.

1. Make sure you have a project
It is really hard to stay motivated and interested when just following tutorials or CADing random things. I first started designing a button board and then a t-shirt cannon robot which we eventually built. Having a project gave me motivation and also a lot of practice and ability to learn from my mistakes due to the size of the project.

2. For FRC, you don't need to know what most of the CAD software does
95% of the parts I design are made almost entirely of circles, rectangles, and hexagons arranged in a circular or rectangular pattern. Most of the more complicated parts are COTS and you can just download the models. However, I will say the one thing you should learn as soon as possible is that pattern tools are your friend. Trust me, I probably drew 200 individual 1/4" holes spaced 1 inch apart before I learned about patterns. Assemblies for robots can be difficult and I still don't know a lot of the best practices, but that is something you should devote more time to because a lot of robot CAD is assembling COTS parts.

3. Learn as you go
I wouldn't personally recommend going through complete tutorials, though if that's how you learn best, don't let me stop you. However, I find it is best to work on a project and when you reach something you don't know how to do, then go and watch a short tutorial or ask somebody. I find this is a lot more efficient and you will also learn a lot just from repetition, especially in term of good practices for easy modification and assembly. In my early projects the last few parts are noticeably (and somewhat entertaingly) better drawn and organized than the first parts.

[orangemoore]

Originally Posted by ASD20

2. For FRC, you don't need to know what most of the CAD software does
95% of the parts I design are made almost entirely of circles, rectangles, and hexagons arranged in a circular or rectangular pattern. Most of the more complicated parts are COTS and you can just download the models. However, I will say the one thing you should learn as soon as possible is that pattern tools are your friend. Trust me, I probably drew 200 individual 1/4" holes spaced 1 inch apart before I learned about patterns. Assemblies for robots can be difficult and I still don't know a lot of the best practices, but that is something you should devote more time to because a lot of robot CAD is assembling COTS parts.

A good rule of thumb I follow is if you are ever thinking, "There has to be a better way" google whatever you are doing and I bet there is a better way.

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by abhishekmalle

but with real struggle and a lack of planning.

If your problem is lack of planning, adding another task isn't going to fix it.

[evoluti1]

Let's take a step back: the D in CAD stands for "Design." If you had asked instead, "Is design essential to all teams?", I think the answer is obviously yes. Whether you're a rookie with no mentors or an IFI team, you should do some amount of design before you start building.

So the real question is, "Is it essential for every team to design some or all of their robot on a computer?" First I want to qualify this: NO team should do ALL of their design in CAD. For instance, a large part of your design should be your
strategy for playing the game, and that's not exactly a task for Solidworks or Inventor. Also, CAD should not get in the way of prototyping - every year I see lots of robots which clearly took lots of time to model, but aren't effective playing the game because the underlying design idea wasn't refined enough through prototyping and iteration. In other words, CAD is just one part of the design process and should be understood and utilized as such. (Perhaps if you're wondering how to make your design more "legit" you should spend some time learning about how design iteration works and how the best teams use it, rather than just focusing on the CAD aspect).

That said, I don't think there's a team in FIRST that wouldn't benefit from using CAD software. To restate the question I posed earlier, we might ask, "in FRC, how does Computer Aided Design compare with Cardboard Aided Design or even Paper Aided Design?"

A lot of people say that CAD is difficult to use because it's harder to learn than doing design on paper. I totally disagree with this, at least I totally disagree with the notion that drafting by hand is significantly easier to master than CAD. Learning to use CAD effectively and learning to draft by hand effectively should both be viewed as large time commitments (it's why drafting used to be an entire high school class!). If you're currently making drawings by hand, but you haven't invested that time and effort, chances are almost 100% that your drawings aren't very good, and you should be investing serious time an effort in a new skill anyway. And if you have to learn a new skill, why not choose the one that's more versatile or applicable in your future career?

With the main drawback out of the way, what are the benefits of CAD over other types of design? For all but the simplest parts, I find that CAD is quicker than hand-drafting. Of course this is largely a function of how much practice you have. But again, if you're not practiced, drawing (well) by hand won't be very quick either. For more complex parts (even if you don't have access to CNC equipment), CAD starts to really shine. Parts that contain anything more than one or two rectangular profiles or square hole patterns quickly become more time consuming to draw by hand than to lay out on a computer.

But one thing a lot of people miss is that CAD isn't just about designing complicated parts with really cool-looking CNC-cut lightening pockets - it's really a tool that can improve any robot. For determining layout of an assembly, you just can't beat CAD, especially in a game like this year where lots of teams found it important to pack all of their hardware into a small space. In addition to 3-D assembly layout, CAD can also help you determine 2-D mechanism geometry before you even start designing any parts. This year, our team was confident we could build an arm that could tackle all of the defenses before the team versions were even finished, all because we could lay out the relevant geometry and constraints in an Inventor sketch. I don't know of a better way to do that kind of planning before you start cutting metal and spending money. (And in case I haven't beat the CAD-is-only-for-fancy-parts horse enough, I should mention that when the time did come to design parts for our arm, CAD helped us figure out how to make it work with only a band saw and a drill press.)

CAD is also more forgiving than drawing by hand. Mistakes can be corrected far more quickly (and often more thoroughly) than on paper. In fact, I'd argue that the ability to correct mistakes alone makes CAD an indispensable tool to have in your repertoire. After all, what is "design" but a process of repeatedly making mistakes in a controlled way and correcting them? Anything that helps you iterate faster is a good thing.

There are lots of other aspects of CAD that make it appealing and worth your time to learn, but if you do decide to pursue it, I think these are the main features that you will soon find indispensable. Like I said, I don't think there's a single team in FIRST that wouldn't benefit from being able to do high-level design and correct mistakes before it's too late. For these and lots of other tasks you simply can't do better than CAD.