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?
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.
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
intriguing
i Wanna hear more
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.
Our Engineer Dan quiggle And Myself cad Our the robot and the parts for it.
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. 
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.
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
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.
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). 
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…:eek: so i wanna know ahead of time .
-Osc-
Thanks in Advance
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.
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
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.
Last year for the first time we used CAD as a major part of the manufacturing.
A couple of problems we ran into were:
- We weren’t as fast as we had hoped and so we slowed down the actual construction of the robot.
- It fit together so well that if something went wrong it was kind of hard to take apart.
We train 12-18 students in SolidWorks in the Fall (it s in November this year) and during the build season we have the design students work at FANUC Robotics along with another engineer and I.
The entire robot is drawn using 3-D solid modeling. The components that are being made directly on a CNC machine (called CAD to master) do not have an associated drawing (2-D). Full blown detail drawings, including tolerancing, are completed for all components not being made CAD to master (about 60%). Usually I will do the tolerancing, because it is quite boring and it takes years of experience to do it fast and right; but most of the modeling is completed by the students.
Not one part is made for our robot without a print, but some parts start to be manufactured before all parts are designed. We also perform Finite Element Analysis on critical components (drive train, arms, etc.). Our philosophy is to show the students as many of the elements of a real world design activity as we can. We have been doing it this way for 3 years.
-Paul
We made our base and sprockets with a CAD/CAM software. We CNCed them later at both our sponsors company and at one of our high schools. Last year was our teams first year having students make parts with CAD.
Throughout the past couple of years our team has just begun developing an Inventor sub team. Last year was the first year that we were able to create a complete functioning CAD robot and the program really helped our designing process.
Last year our school just started the Project Lead the Way program so we were able to outfit our lab with the software we needed. We also now had more students on hand with knowledge of how to work the software. We started out in the fall downloading files or drawing parts that we were pretty confident we would need. We also had to come up with a way to organize the files so that everyone could access them and know what each part was. We decided that the easiest way to organize the files was to have the whole robot in one folder, using the name to describe what the subsystem, the name of the part, and the dimensions were.
We used Inventor to draw many test ideas that we had and as soon as we had a firm stance on what we wanted the robot to do we began to draw the robot and as we finished assemblies in CAD we would take the drawing files over to manufacturing to have them made. Using the CAD program we were able to design the most compact and best looking robot we had ever had. As Joe said before, if compact is what you are going for, make sure to think about realities of having to service the robot and easy ways of switching out parts.
In addition to making drawings of the parts for the manufacturing team, we also compiled a notebook of all the parts of the robot, assemblies of the subsystems, and explosions of the in order to help us fix the robot and explain how it worked to anyone who was interested. We try not to look at what we are doing as just drawing the parts, we try to emulate the design process in which our sponsor companies and other real world applications would go through to design a product.
Carl Lewis, an original X-Cat all the way from 1992 (the guy who’s always wearing the funky hats on our team) is our CAD specialist. We won the 2001 - AutoDesk Award for Realization for a team at the championship. We get our kids and other mentors to assist as the season goes on but Carl is the main man with the Cad.