Our team is redesigning our 2008 robot for an upcoming off-season event that is exactly 5 weeks away. We plan to hold a mini-build season that lasts for 4 weeks; however, I am not sure of the most efficient way to do so.
Approach #1- Subteams (mech, elec and prog) work simultaneously over the course of the 4 weeks. Possible problems include meetings where a task can’t get done because another subteam hasn’t complete a prior task and confusion concerning the activities of other subteams. I think this approach requires very detailed planning that includes precise measurements. This kind of designing can take forever though!
Approach #2- Team agrees on a concept and a rough design on what the robot will do/look like. The Mechanical subteam fabricates and assembles all parts they are responsible for. The Mech subteam then passes it off to the electrical subteam that then creates an electrical board and wires the robot. Then the Electrical team passes the robot off to the programming team that writes the drive code and programs other robot components. The con’s of this approach is that one subteam can delay the whole process for the rest of the subteams.
Which approach do you think is more efficient? Do you have any ideas for a totally different approach?
Spilt into subteams so that multiole things can be accomplished at once.
As for the waiting on others to finish their part; divide the work so that there is always something else that can be done while waiting. It’s mostly going to how well your team can manage your time
you can make sure everything fits and you can manipulate piece virtually rather than getting something build and realizing something doesn’t fit the way you though.
To be honest, I prefer Solidworks. If you have inventor, thatz great. But the key thing is that in CAD, you can make each individual part and then make an assembly of your robot. Also individual parts can be converted to mastercam files and then to the CNC. Thatz what we do. If you need any help, email me at [email protected]. I would love to help your team with CAD and so would anyone else on Chief Delphi.
I think that in order for the whole team to work efficiently, you should all start on the same page. If you come up with your basic design, you should be able to plan out how big your electrical board and other components should be so that the fabricators and electricians can get to work quickly. CAD is very useful, not just for part creation, but also space management (even if its just a bunch of blocks representing subsystems).
So basically what I am suggesting is that you plan the space in your robot from the get go, and make a decision on robot form that you will stick to early.
The other benefit of using CAD is that with programs such as Solidworks and AutoCAD you can go to the FRC website or other parts suppliers such as Andymark and download 3D CAD files of parts from the FRC kit or from the company’s catalog.
On 467 we used a big plotter printer to print out 2-D CAD images which we then cut out and then attached to our sheet aluminum. The benefit of this is that we could more reliably make precision cuts and drill more precisely.
More precision= less wasted material= more money for other stuff.
