I am pleased to announce F4 will be hosting our third CADathon from August 3rd at 8 PM EST - August 6th at 6 PM EST. The live show with a brand new panel of judges will be streamed on August 7th at 8pm EST in partnership with FUN!
For those unaware, a CADathon is like a hackathon but with CAD. People/teams are given a short period of time to CAD a specific thing (in this case a robot) ending with a panel of judges selecting a winner. If you would like more information on the CADathon check out our first and secondCADathons as well as our second CADathons live show.
As for what will go on in ours:
Participants will be split into teams of 2. Teams can be premade with people who know each other or participants can enter by themselves and be assigned a random partner. Partners will be assigned by skill level along with the prerequisite of sharing a common CAD suite. We will try to make sure partners are in the same time zone but that will be more difficult. From there, teams will be put in individual google hangouts groups where they can discuss and collaborate. The teams have approximately 3 days to CAD a robot from the game reveal. The game reveal will include a CAD model of the field, a short video explaining the game, and a game manual. When they are done, teams must create a high quality render of their robot and send the F4 crew a link to their robot uploaded in its entirety on Grabcad. Teams will also submit a google forms “pit scouting document” which will help explain their design to the judges. If teams do not submit both a render and a Grabcad link by 6pm est on August 3rd, they will be disqualified. Once done, the files will be inspected to make sure they adhere to the game rules. At 6 PM EST on August 5th, a special F4 CADathon show will go live. First, each team will come on and explain their robots to the audience. Then, a panel of 3 special guest judges will judge each robot on set categories explained in the game manual. The judges will then figure out how many points the robot can potentially score off of a quantitative scoring system. The winner will then be determined based on all of those factors.
The only prerequisites to join are that you are willing to spend time doing it and that you have access to some CAD software. You can be any age (this is not limited to students) and we encourage everyone from newbies to the most advanced CADers to put their skills to the test. If you are new to CAD and would like to be on a larger team to help yourself learn, please contact us as these will be handled on a case to case basis. If you are interested please sign up at the link below. Sign Ups close on July 30rd at Midnight but please sign up as soon as you decide to participate.
If you are interested in being a judge for the show apply here.
Just sent in the form as randomized, but cause Onshape there’s a decent chance I’m working alone. If someone does want to work together shoot me a pm and we’ll talk about it. Also if someone has any experience rendering in Onshape (Onerender seems to be a thing but idk how/if it works) let me know, cause I should probably take care of this “high quality render” before spending 3 days on this project. I have a mac (school required) so that makes things more complicated…
TL;DR: I’m looking for two partners! Read below for details.
So, as stated above I’m looking for two partners (so basically an already formed team). I’m working as a course observer at Stanford University during the day so I can’t really put as much time into a partnership to make it fair for both of us. So, the F4 people organizing the event have given me the approval to work with another group, making it three people. I’m decent at Solidworks and pretty much flexible in the evening, and because you still have two people having me on your team is only a plus :).
I notice that both this time and last time it was said that teams would come on and explain their designs to the audience. This however didn’t appear to happen last time, at least on the archived live stream, will this occur this year and if so how would this likely to down. Also would this be a substitute to the written explanations used last time?
It’s really too bad this is in the middle of a week and not a weekend - I think you’d get a lot more participation on a weekend. Not saying I’d necessarily do it, but weekday events are a nonstarter for me and I’d at least consider drawing something for a weekend.
Just to make sure it was done correctly, to sign up to participate with another individual who you are forming a team with both you and this other individual enter the same team name on the last section of the sign up sheet?
Hey everyone! I’m part of Team 4904 Bot-Provoking, and I think that I’d like to join the CADathon. I’m pretty confident in my CAD skills (I became the team’s mechanical design lead after one year) and am looking to enter to try and learn new things. Most of my friends are out of town during the time when CADathon is happening, so before I put “random assignment” on the survey I was wondering if there was anyone from a Bay Area/California team that wanted to work together.
PM me or email me at [email protected] if you’re interested in teaming up!
In past cadathons most of our participants have been students who are all pretty much on summer break right now. Generally for them weekends are more packed than weekdays unless they have a job.
