Preseason Design: What are the Limits?

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Stud Man Dan

Also I'm working on this being my senior project for the next two semesters, if my Senior Group would be putting 2 semesters worth of design work into a general design base for FIRST teams that I commissioned, got faculty support for and funded, and this base could not be used in any competitions then I really need to find something else to do lol.

There's a fine line here that needs to be delineated. Coming up with a half dozen design studies for drivetrains, manipulators and subsections of manipulators (such as end effectors, arm joints, swivel bases, etc) is a good thing, and this can be very useful to teams struggling to engineer systems. Too much detail is not a good thing.

What this isn't is a detailed set of drawings showing the whole answer. Not only is that not in the spirit of FIRST (or within the rules) but it's also not much fun. "Here kid, just build this". FIRST is not advanced shop class, it is engineering practice, that's why some teams only design their Bot and literally have a team of adult machinists fabricate the design. As long as they machinists don't modify the design to 'make it work', it's fine with me and I hope with FIRST. It doesn't really matter who fabricates the pieces, the important thing is whether the design will work or not.

By "Design Study", I mean some accurate drawings and renderings that show exactly how something works, including exploded views - but no dimensions. Call is a design sketch. It is a tool that can be used to gain insight into, say, how to design a good arm joint (with 6 examples), but someone still has to do the work to figure out the exact sizes, materials, etc to actually assemble one.

So instead of handing out pre-printed solutions, hand out a crash course in FRC engineering. Show a 4, 6 and 8 wheel drivetrain, discuss the relative merits and liabilities of belt, chain and gear drives, some basic pseudocode for a PID loop, how to make an extendible arm six different ways.... you get the idea. This would easily fill a textbook (Hey college student, are you published yet? Wanna be?) with one system per chapter.

Now that would be a project worth doing.

Need any help?

Don