For 2019, 1745 The P-51 Mustangs have decided to have all of our working design files in the “Open”; CAD, Code, sketches, math, flow charts it’s all there for anyone to read/copy. These are all the files we are working from. Nothing hidden or secret, just the whole ugly unrefined mess.
Note: These are just the working files, we will not be providing context or curation of these (if you want that, go read Spectrums Blog . . . it’s what we do).
That’s fantastic! I really think that open design is strongly in the spirit of FRC. Even if no one uses the ideas, it’s helpful to learn from others’ process. I’m not worried about competitive success - the best robots (barring any game breaking rule loophole) are almost always great implementations of relatively simple ideas, practiced and programmed really well.
I’d like our team to get there too, and maybe we will. Right now I’m not sure where to find the extra time outside of meetings and work/school to publicly document all of the thoughts and decisions.
Just start anywhere, post some CAD a few weeks into the season. Like you said even if no one uses it it’s still useful. Error on side of sharing and don’t worry if it’s not fully documented or perfect.
Ya know, this is an excellent point. I might talk with our other mentors and see if they would be open to posting some open designs and maybe make a post now and then about what we have been using and designing.
Great idea! 3946 has been doing this with code from day one, as the code base is managed in publicly readable github repositoris at https://github.com/frc3946. If you keep CAD on a similar collaboration site, it should just be a matter of making it publicly visible.
This year we’re using Onshape, so that should be easy to do. I believe our Github is already public, just not often posted. This will likely be the first year we fully CAD the bot in some time, and we’re a bit low on mentors, but I imagine posting an update once a week, or every other week couldn’t hurt.
Goal was to build a low hatch bot (cargo bays and rocket) that was small and robust. Still iterating on the mechanism, so it didn’t get bagged. Have a lot of practice left to do but pretty happy overall.
24"x24" frame perimeter
Custom 3-NEO gearboxes on a 2+2 WCD with 6" wheels
8.69:1 gear ratio for an adj. free speed of 13.9 ft/s
Check out the Onshape at the link at the top to check out the current mechanism
