Are You A CAD Specialist?

[CMBrandon]

Working with several of our teams we always find interesting stories from the members, and Karen was no exception. Karen is from Team 702 The Bagel Bytes and loves CAD. You can read about her story here: http://maker.coolermaster.com/karen-stout/

How did you get involved in CAD? Share your story below and let us know!

[Munchskull]

I started on my team when I was in 8th grade. At the time the very little bit of cad that was done was done after the fact to document the building of the robot. At that time I was on the electrical sub-team. In 2014 I did both mechanical and electrical. That year my team made it to the world championship. There I was able to talk with other team and I found out how important CAD is to making a successful robot. After that a friend and I were able to convince the team to set up a CAD/Design team so that our robots would be coordinated and could use cnc parts. Ever since then I have been trying to inspire other students on the importance of design and planing.

[TAlholm]

I joined team 1991 in 2013 after using Autodesk Inventor in our PLTW classes. I fell in love with creating and designing using the software. It was around that time that our team was transitioning from Autodesk to Solidworks, and I found everything I disliked about Inventor fixed in Solidworks (to an extent, but Visualize will be amazing.) In 2014, I mainly worked on making concepts. During the 2014 off-season, I kept myself busy by making swerve modules, therefore extending my experience. 2015, I did the model for the swerve we used. 2016, I was the head of design.
I've learned a lot about CAD just in high school, and even more once I started using Chief Delphi. CAD allows me to bring the many concepts I have to life. 3d printing was amazing, being able to hold what you made in a program like Solidworks in your hand.
Hopefully, when I go up to Maine for college, I will help teach nearby teams Solidworks or help expand their knowledge. CAD was an inspiration for me, and I want to inspire others through CAD.

[Monochron]

This is really cool Brandon. Showcasing actually high school students and giving them serious recognition for their work on their team is beyond awesome. Keep up the awesome!

[KohKohPuffs]

After being on drive team for two years without much involvement in STEM-related work, I decided to go into CAD, learning via Google Hangouts and following step-by-step in how to assemble certain mechanisms (e.g. gearboxes, drivetrains, intakes, etc.). After an unexpected move to another school, I continued to do CAD, teaching myself and improving my skills through the help of CD feedback. During that winter, I started the very first CADathon. Although it wasn't much, the idea was improved upon by others. Now after a rather disappointing build season, I'm completing my high school year on a rookie team as a CAD/design officer, where I hope to establish a positive environment, not like previously where I often was excluded from participation.

[Tcrump47]

I got into CAD 4 Years ago, when I was in 8th Grade. My mom worked for a Solidworks Reseller. I went into her office one day and met the Engineers because I was looking into being an Engineer. I knew at that point I loved Engineering and I had found my passion. One of the AE's introduced me into Solidworks, and I picked it up very quick. After that he invited me to take the Essentials Class. Boy was I happy. There was a room filled with 10+ engineers and me learning the software. The AE that was teaching the class talked to me after and he said I was doing better than he expected and that I was keeping up with the actual engineers. After that I took a few more classes. The beginning of 2013 I got my CSWA as a incoming Freshman of Highschool. I then had no clue what I wanted to do. Then my Sophomore year I was introduced into FRC and have been in it ever since.

[asid61]

Before high school, my dream was to become a marine biologist and study octopuses and mantis shrimp. But once I tried out the FRC team at my new high school, I was hooked in a matter of days. I quickly picked up skills in mechanical handwork, took a machining class, and researched electronics and microcontroller programming on my own. In my sophomore year, I started CADding more and more in an effort to bring the level of the team up by using advanced CAD techniques that we had not used in our 16-year history. But alas, that sophomore year ended in an immobile robot and barely getting into quarterfinals as an inbounder for 2014 (and as a 16-year old team!), destroying the team and myself in spirit. But those of us who continued on to the next year vowed to do better in the future and fix our lacking mechanical department, and so I embarked on a 2,000+ hour CAD journey to try and be the best at CAD that I possibly could be, and I think it was then that I decided that I wanted to be a mechanical engineer.
In the end, I don't think I fixed all the problems, or even most of them. With greater CAD and machining skills came greater complexity and more risks. 2015 had few problems design-wise and turned out to be my favorite and most effective bot, but by comparison 2016 was near-disaster. That being said, I greatly value the amount I've learned through repetitive CAD and reiteration, and not just getting suggestions and tips and answers from CD through the last 3 years (shoutout to the people who commented on my swerve drives in efforts to make them better ). Ultimately, I think the most valuable thing I learned from CAD is that it is the perfect tool for fleshing out ideas, and it taught be so much about the engineering process and thinking outside the box. My spatial skills and creativity have improved leaps and bounds due to CAD, and my experience with Solidworks is one that would be hard to match doing anything else. I'm planning on using CAD and learning more long into the future!

[niklas674]

At the start of my FRC journey, I was convinced that i wanted to be involved with mechanical work, but an opportunity was presented to me to operate our CNC's. Throught this is learned CAM software and a little bit of CAD. The true point of becoming a "CAD Specalist" came at the end of last year. Our long time design head graduated and i was voted in as the new design head. I then committed myself to becoming more skilled with CAD. I took on the project of designing and new offseason robot as well as competing in the F4 CADathon. These two events have really helped me hone my skills.

I look forward to doing robot design for the next couple of build seasons to come and see where we go with them.

[OccamzRazor]

I got started in 2004 using AutoCAD and Inventor in high school until I was introduced to SOLIDOWORKS, ProE/CREO in 2007. 587 used AutoCAD and Inventor while I was on the team so I got used to using it until I went to a university.

At first the learning curve was there for all of them but after I had used all three I settled on SOLIDWORKS as the tool of choice because it was faster, easier to use, and just as powerful if not more as the other choices especially if you are doing sheet metal or weldments.

I helped start my current team in 2010 and made SOLIDWORKS the tool of choice. After being a research assistant, graduating from UNCC, and working in manufacturing for a while I started teaching and consulting with my current employer using and selling SOLIDWORKS. FRC even helped me get this job because my boss knew about FRC because his daughter was on a local team.

I worked from the bottom up and got my Certified SOLIDWORKS Expert (CSWE) as well as my instructors certification which is fairly difficult to accomplish for most users. (Less than 1% of all users have a CSWE) I contribute this to FRC and starting early!

FRC taught me CAD and CAD made me successful enough to land a pretty sweet job at a younger age. I now pass this on yearly to the FRC students in all of the teams in the area.

[CMBrandon]

Thanks! We are always impressed with the teams and how individuals contribute. Giving them a special spotlight is the least we can do. Expect a lot more of this in the coming year. Big plans!

[Eric Scheuing]

In 2006, four of my friends and I started to learn Autodesk Inventor to help with the CAD for our robot that year. We spent most of the 2006 season building proficiency with Inventor instead of actually designing the robot, and ended up completing the CAD work after the robot was done. In our 2007 season, we were able to hit the ground running, help flesh out much of our design, and provide drawings and feedback to the rest of the build team. We finished that season with an Einstein banner and I came out with a deep appreciation of how important CAD is to the design process.

We got a shoutout from Autodesk here. Unforunately the links on that site are dead, but it still contains the only image I was able to find of our work that year.

[Chris is me]

I got into CAD because of my ego, I think. I wanted to be a Cool FIRST Kid who was super helpful and held the team together. Not the most altruistic motivation, but I was 18 and inspired... So CAD was a skill much of the team lacked, so I started exploring it bit by bit. Now I think I mentor much more "for the right reasons", but now I also know CAD and can design robots. So that's cool.

I don't think I'm a person who was born to do CAD, nor am I particularly "naturally" good at it like a lot of the talented students on CD seem to be. I can never work as quickly as others at it, but to some extent that's because of how methodical and careful I am when making sketches / models.

CAD is very important to me as it is the best way I can express myself as a designer and engineer. I am pretty bad at sketching ideas quickly on paper, and though I get better with graph paper and a ruler it's often hard for me to visualize things well enough to draw them right the first time. So CAD, among other things, is the best way for me to explore and explain design ideas. I think it's important to take advantage of the flexibility of CAD and specifically being able to build models around adaptable constraints. This is the key advantage over hand drafting.

[gc_coxen]

I'll be going into my senior year this coming year and fourth season with my team and up until this point I hadn't been heavily involved in fabrication or cad. This summer I was determined to learn as much as I could about solidworks before this next season so I could contribute as much as I could to the team.

Over the past few months I've been teaching myself solidworks with the assistance of random online guides. This was all just practice exercises until I finally had the chance to CNC mill a part and it was a very fulfilling moment to see all that work pay off.

[Rangel(kf7fdb)]

I'm not a cad specialist since my main skill is and always will be programming but I was one of the pioneers of cad for 842. I was inspired to start learning cadding my sophomore year of high school. As a freshman on the team, I was very underwhelmed to say the least at the performance of my team's robot. I was still learning the basics of robotics at the time and was dissatisfied with the design process of our robot compared to other teams, many of which were far outperforming our robot.

So I did something about it and started to learn the basics of cadding with Google SketchUp. I went pretty far with it by designing drivetrains using our old tride and true material, pultruded fiberglass. I got even as far as making quick mock up of arms and using the component feature in order show rudimentary animation of robot arm rotations.

I felt like I was at the limit with what I could do with sketch up so I was pretty fortunate that Steven Forbes joined our team as our first engineering mentor. He introduced me to Autodesk Inventor and I quickly dove into different tutorials I found online. I didn't get good enough to contribute caddng for our Logomotion robot before it was built but I was able to get a solid understanding by cadding it as it was being built.

I moved on to Solidworks fairly quickly due to Steve being more experienced with it and able to help me better. I learned most of what I learned from him and another member and friend Dillon Dayea started learning cadding too. It was the start of rebound rumble and together with Dillon under Steve's guidance, we designed the first 842 bot before it was built.

I feel like we really pushed our limits in 2013 where we designed our first full aluminum robot(rip fiberglass) with an arm that had floor pickup, human loading, 3pt frisbee scoring, and a 30 point climb. It may not have been a strategically smart choice but it was probably the most technically challenging robot we ever designed or built. From there, me and Dillon graduated and a whole team of cadders were born in 842, following and surpassing us.

[Dibit1010]

I only joined my robotics team because of CAD. As a freshman I was on the imagery team but decided to quit before build season to do theatre instead. Later that year I had an engineering class that taught CAD (not the exact same software we use in robotics but there are underlying similarities in all CAD programs) since I felt like I had skills to bring to the table I joined my sophomore year and loved it! That year I ended up being CAD captain, going into my junior year I hope to be drive coach and maybe Vice President. Without CAD I wouldn't be on a team!


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