I was wondering if there were any software or techniques that teams used to work on different parts of their CAD Assemblies such that team members can update parts without going through a large reintegration process on a high level scale. Currently we have a GrabCad workbench and the process is as follows
Student 1 makes changes to component design or part design
Student 1 uploads changes to Grab Cad
Student 2 downloads updated component model
Student 2 updates component in assembly
Student 2 re-uploads updated assembly to GrabCad
Right now our process is pretty clunky and definitely doesn’t scale well as you can see.It would be great to smooth it out with a process, technique or software that allows for easier collaboration. It would be great to hear how the rest of the community tackles this problem.
My team’s solution is just to use as many subassemblies as possible. If you have two people were messing with the same assembly (e.g. the full robot cad) then one of them generally gets overridden, however if one is doing the flywheel and the other the collector then grabcad should compensate for both.
Team and cloud storage are the primary reasons why we have standardized on Fusion 360 several years ago. Similar to github, each member can be assigned on certain part or an entire assembly. Team lead/mentor can then bring all them into the main robot drawing and put things together. Any update on sub parts are can just be updated on the main drawing.
We LOVE Onshape. It allows us to access our CAD from anywhere, anytime, and on almost any device. We don’t have to worry about version control, and although there have been minor bugs, Onshape as a whole has been remarkably stable during the course of the whole season. Onshape also lets you “follow” a user, so you can see what other people are working on in the CAD. It’s a remarkably integrated and unified experience, which has benefited my team as well as others in pursuing excellence.
The software that we use is called perforce or p4v and it allows you to submit and upload parts as well as revert to earlier versions if necessary. I do not know exactly how we have gotten this set up but it would be worth looking at.
In my team they are using Google drive, being able to open on any PC where the archives are synchronized, you just have to ask before opening any assembly, in special “full bot”, in my fsae team we use drop box, the main assembly only the Mechanical captain is allowed to change, and between sub-teams we just send a message on Workplace to confirm nobody is already using it