Making CAD Models Faster

[MikeFinn]

Thanks for all the feedback!

I was hesitant to put on #4, because of the issues described here. However, I know our design lead the last couple years has been forced to stay up late CADing, and I just assumed other teams did it too. Of course, our team has done it in the past because we basically had one person CADing the robot the past few years. Because we spent our offseason training several more people, I'm guessing that working at home will be minimal.

Parallel processing is your friend. If you can find a way to build and CAD at the same time it's a big help.

Could you describe how this could be done? It's hard to make a final design while the prototyping teams are still figuring out the best way to shoot a ball or lift an object.
The closest thing I could think of is to have the mechanism designers "work part-time" as members of the prototyping team. That way they would understand what it is they're designing and possibly even start on the design work while its still being prototyped.

One of the best ways to speed up your CAD work is to mitigate and reduce mistakes. At some point if not many points in the season, you will change something you had not planned on changing. Whether this is because of mistake or because designs changed, it doesn't matter. But an extra 15 minutes of work when you first create a part can end up saving an hour when you have to go back and change it.
When I do CAD, I almost never leave sketches undefined. It doesn't matter how insignificant a line might be, I'm gonna define it just so I know it won't do funny things when I start doing funny things with parts in an assembly.

Thanks for pointing this out. I know I've adopted this practice, but I really should get the other students to do this.
Example: Our team is 90% sure that we are using a WCD drive base for next season, so I made an 8WD out of VersaFrame and COTS gearboxes (we aren't at a level to make sheet metal chassis or custom gearboxes) where we can easily change the dimensions, wheel spacing and gearbox placement just by changing a few numbers. I'll have to put it on GrabCAD later, but if we decide to go with this design, we could easily have the drive base designed in Week 1.

I've built up a decent library of COTS components, all with proper material and mass details (gears, bearings, sprockets, etc) and corrected features

We're building up an Autodesk Vault library of COTS components, but I never thought to change the mass and material before we upload it. This is a really good idea, but I don't think we'll have the time to do it for this build season. Definitely something to try next offseason.

Again, thanks for all of your help!