How do you know when to CAD vs draw up on paper quickly

[s_forbes]

Originally Posted by CraigHickman

There's a fun exercise you can do to test this out. Have one of your team members go grab a random part from an old robot, mainly one that was Milled simply. Have him/her sketch it out "quickly" on a piece of paper, with all the dimensions THEY think you'd need to make it. Give that drawing to a team member who has not seen what part it's drawn from, and have them try to make it. Unless your student has taken some drafting courses, or is quite gifted in conveying all the details of the part on a sheet of paper, I'm pretty sure there will be errors.

What we do instead is try to make all of the students understand the importance of being able to draw things correctly with proper dimensions. "Did you draw a picture of it?" has kind of become a catch phrase on our team.

As far as our robot design goes, we don't use CAD software as often as we could. If something can be drawn to scale on paper, then we just do that. There are always a few things that are easier to do in CAD though, like our helix this year. It's nice to know that it will actually fit on the robot before we put it there.