Are You A CAD Specialist?

[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.