CAD on your team?

[SpaceOsc]

What does cad do on your team how and when?

My teams for he first time implementing a large depence on a good cad team to muster up the robot way ahead of time.. so i wonder how have other teams use cad to there advantage?

[Cory]

I CAD'ed out almost the entire robot last year.

Unfortunately we deviated from our plan so much it all turned out to be useless.

[Greg Needel]

in past years we have built then cadded for the competition but this year we are implementing the rule that everything must be done in cad before it can be manufactured

[SpaceOsc]

intriguing


i Wanna hear more

[Bcahn836]

This season will be our fourth year in FIRST and this is the first time Cadd has been made a sub team. And that team will be tasked with alot to draw. In the past we have used Cadd for layouts and certain machined parts but thats about it. This year the entire robot will be drawn out on Cadd.

[Tytus Gerrish]

Our Engineer Dan quiggle And Myself cad Our the robot and the parts for it.

[TLonghorns0593]

On 93 everything is drawn up in CAD before it is allowed to be manufactured. We assemble the entire robot in CAD and we know what it will look like before we are finished. I think this is a great idea to use, it will aid in repeatability for others to do, and for you to do if something ever breaks. We also have a naming program for our parts too, which really helps out our machining team when they need a part drawing printed off.

[Joshua May]

I've been using Inventor over the summer, and three of our team members are in the Engineering class here, where they learn with Inventor 8. Thanks to this, my team will be using those skills to design our robot ahead of time with Inventor.

[Daniel Brim]

Team 294 did a cad robot last year for the first time. Unfortunately, I was the only student who knew how to use CAD, so we were barely done for the award submission, let alone kickoff. This year we are CADing (is that a word?) a universal base that we may use for next year's competion.

-Daniel

[Ali Ahmed]

We used CAD a whole lot last year because we CNCed a lot of stuff on our machine and because me and another team member is actually taking the CAD class offered at our school so we know what we are doing. But i think it is very important and helpful to learn. Inventor is good as well.

[Gabe Salas Jr.]

Just about everything on our robot each year has been taken into consideration using CAD. We train several students at the beginning of the school year to learn the basics of using a CAD program (we use ProE), and then when robotics start, nobody has an excuse to not participate (at least those working on design, and the robot itself).

The more time you spend on designing and integrating your robot on CAD, the easier, and faster it is to assemble the actual robot. Just make sure you give your team enough time to order the parts you may need (another reason to use CAD).

[SpaceOsc]

i dont know if i should make a new thread for this but


For those teams who have attempted or have used Cad or a Cad team to make or make part of your robot during bulding season...

What issues have come up, technical , Logistical, Or organizational , please mention any and all no matter how small

BTw im Co-Teaching a Inventor Class... so i wanna know ahead of time .

-Osc-


Thanks in Advance

[Cory]

logistical: if you have more than one person doing drawings, make sure that *every* part is on file at one location always accessible during meetings/build sessions, so when person A isn't at a meeting, and all the files for x mechanism are on their computer, you arent up a creek without a paddle.

[ChrisH]

PDM (Product Data Management)

PDM is one of the biggest areas you will have problems with when using CAD. It means keeping track of information that has been generated in CAD. Which parts have been designed and which haven't? Which are ready for manufacture (released is the term we use at work) and which are still being worked on? What models were used for a "study" where you are just trying to figure out what will work, and which are for "real" parts? Is this the "current" version of the part? Have any changes (there are always changes) been incorporated into the design and what were they?

All of these questions need to be addressed by a PDM system. BTW it doesn't have to be a full blown computer aided system that automatically directs designs to the people that need to approve them, like the one we use at work. A paper parts list with check boxes will work. But it does need to be updated regularly, easy to understand, and readily accessible to anybody who needs it.

ChrisH

[rees2001]

Our team has been using Inventor for a few years now and it has made the construction of the robot pretty nice. We are a Project Lead The Way school and have Inventor on every computer in our tech wing. Our school's IT people set up a shared drive that all of the students on the team can access. We just have to supply them with the student login information. We set up a folder and a project file (this is fairly important for assemblies) for saving parts and assemblies. Almost all of the students on our build team have had a class or 2 or 3 with Inventor so teaching isn't an issue. We construct the entire robot first in Inventor & then build. Some parts are built before the entire assembly is complete but the final frame isn't cut until all subassemblies are complete and put with the final robot.
Some problems we faced in the past:
When we worked at our sponsor's location, we had issues that we only had a few computers to work on. It became difficult to transfer files, and give each sub-team enough time to work on their designs. Now we have over 100 computers to use so it is not a problem.
A few years ago we didn't set up the Project File and our assemblies got all messed up.
Occasionally some students will save work to their own network drive and forget to put it on the shared drive. This wasn't a huge problem because Teachers can access student files and it was just a little more work for me to go and get the files for the other sub-teams.
Oddly enough we have never submitted a robot for the Autodesk award. It doesn't seem like it would be a stretch for us we just haven't done it. It can be something new for this year.