Are You A CAD Specialist?

[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]

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.