This is a fair point and we’ll take it into consideration when planning future CADathons.
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If anyone wants to see our tech binder and cad for this cadathon. I got inspired by our team’s tech binder that we make every year so I used the same ideas in this one. Here it is: F4 CADathon Team 345 Presents: Payload
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The decision to not release teams CAD ourselves after the competition is released is something that has been thoroughly discussed on multiple occasions.
While releasing teams CAD files, scouting documents, and technical binders could provide a great learning experience for teams, it is something we have decided to leave up to the individual teams as we do not believe it is our place to share. There are several reasons for this.
To start, all of these documents are the intellectual property of the students who designed them. It is not my place nor any other GDC members place to publicly share participants’ IP.
On top of that many teams have strict rules on sharing CAD as well as sharing their design libraries which are often uploaded as part of the submissions. We do not want to exclude any students from participating and we believe this alone would prevent a fair amount of students from competing.
Additionally, some participants may not be looking for Feedback from anyone but the judges. CD, in particular, can be incredibly hostile at times and especially new designers may not appreciate the constructive criticism they would get if their designs were uploaded for anyone to criticize.
Lastly for me personally a big reason I have not pushed for it is that we have no real idea whether a lot of these designs actually even work. Anyone who has been around FRC for any length of time knows that just because something looks good in CAD does not mean it will actually perform as planned in real life. While the designs presented can be a great source of ideas, there is no actual reason to believe many of them would function if actually built. The competition is built around improving CAD skills and sometimes that can lead to some amazingly creative designs that frankly most likely would not behave as planned.
That said I personally thoroughly enjoy reading the Chiefdelphi threads following the CADathons and have found our CADathon Slack to be a great resource for teams. If you would like more information on any team’s design I encourage you to reach out to the teams. In my experience, they have all been incredibly receptive and would be happy to collaborate.
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I don’t see why there can’t be any method to ask individual teams if they want their CADs and documentation made public and release the ones who do in any kind of organized format that people can actually find if they want to, rather than just letting individual teams upload them as replies that get lost in long threads with no real place to put them. Especially when it is recommended by judges and you have people in twitch chat asking questions about robots/wanting to see more.
Lastly for me personally a big reason I have not pushed for it is that we have no real idea whether a lot of these designs actually even work. Anyone who has been around FRC for any length of time knows that just because something looks good in CAD does not mean it will actually perform as planned in real life. While the designs presented can be a great source of ideas, there is no actual reason to believe many of them would function if actually built. The competition is built around improving CAD skills and sometimes that can lead to some amazingly creative designs that frankly most likely would not behave as planned.
I’m not quite sure why you would take it upon yourself to try to keep people from finding large robot CADs because you don’t think people are capable of looking at a cool CADathon design and not assuming it would work in real life.
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Actively preventing teams from releasing their CAD and designs would be taking it upon ourselves to do that. Leaving them the option of releasing it themselves is by definition, not taking it upon ourselves.
This is pretty much the solution we just came up with, and will most likely start implementing this or a very similar version starting from next CADathon.
Speaking of that, is there an estimated time for this? I heard summer, but if it’s sometime like July/August I bet a few more teams would be able to train new members some more in between now and then, my team included.
Summer CADathons are typically that time frame and we have every intention to host CADathon 9 this summer.
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Inventor > SaladWerkz
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I’m fairly certain this is to increase “hype” and viewership of the F.U.N. hosted stream. A little overly aggressive imo, especially considering the most “hype worthy” teams want to keep their designs secretive until the livestream.
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Half the fun is coming up with your own design. I know for me I would be tempted to replicate what someone else is doing if we could just share our designs left and right.
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Sorry for this very late feedback. We finally were able to get all the feedback from all the judges.
Here is the scoring sheet: https://bit.ly/3cTL8wD
Here is the master feedback sheet: https://bit.ly/3dVgaWe
Simply ctrl+f and type in your team number to find your feedback. If you are in the top 15 (plus a couple other teams) you should have feedback from all 4 judges.
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We also have a post-event survey for you to fill out to help us improve future CADathons. Please fill it out here: https://forms.gle/NinwPUjxB3mUZvTv6
Thank you for helping us make the CADathon better for everyone!
We’ll be keeping the poll above open for about another week, so if you haven’t had a chance to get us your feedback, please respond before then!
Thank you to the respondents so far for helping us make future CADathons better!
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The feedback form is now closed. Thank you to everybody who responded!
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