FIRST Mechanism Library

FIRST General Forum
1

Hey all,

Ian Mackenzie and I have been working on a small project over the past few months. We got to talking one day, and realized that when brainstorming or designing FIRST robots, we often look to pictures of past designs for ideas and inspiration. Ian thought it would be a great idea if we could get all these pictures in one place.

There are many extensive galleries on the web, most notably FIRSTrobotics.net, team229.org and of course here at ChiefDelphi. The difficulty with these galleries was that the pictures were usually indexed by team number, or some other method that didn’t serve our purpose.

So Ian and I have scoured the web for the past while, and gone through tens of thousands of photos. We’ve taken the best shots, and organized them by mechanism. From there we’ve created the FIRST Mechanism Library. (Well Ian did the creating, I just found pictures.)

At the FIRST Mechanism Library, you can find pictures of all sorts of designs sorted by mechanism. Current categories include Arms, Drivetrains, Elevators, Frames, Gearboxes, Grippers, Joints, Rollers and Wheels.

We really envision this site being a very useful design tool. It’s currently being hosted by the Waterloo Regional Website, and can be found here:

http://firstrobotics.uwaterloo.ca/resources.php

We’d really like this gallery to grow, and for it to do so we need your help. If you have any pictures you’d like included please email us at [email protected]

If you have any questions or comments, please PM myself or Ian.

Enjoy.

2

Absolutely fabulous! Thanks so much.

Here’s another one for drivetrain:
http://www.team696.org/2003pics/team696/227.jpg

And here’s another one for frames:
http://team696.com/images/earlystage.jpg

3

Karthik and Ian … this is so cool. i know for a fact that this will help me out sooner or later when it comes to designing. great project and it was done by two of the great FIRSTers… thanks. :slight_smile:

4

A+++++++

You guys really made a powerful tool for teams in need! GOOD JOB!!

5

Awesome idea and great job on implementing it!!!

I was going to suggest that a link to it be added, but it looks like someone was ahead of the game on that one!
Thanks for the great resource!

6

Wow, I just used it for a design, this will be something used for many seasons. It will be intresting to watch in it how our ideas change over time! Great work and idea.
ivey

7

looks great…although there are quite a few doubles of images. i only looked at the arms page, but i saw about a dozen doubles. just throwing it out there. otherwise it looks great.

8

This is awesome. Thanks for the site and all the hard work that you guys put in. I’m sure this site as well as the 696 drivetrain site will really be an asset when it comes down to crunch time and ideas are needed.
-Aaron

9

Yeah, sorry about that - Karthik and I looked for photos independently, and while we tried not too look at the same galleries, it happened at least once (and a lot of these photos are posted in multiple places anyways, so for instance I’d download a copy from firstrobotics.net and then Karthik would download a copy from Chief Delphi). I’ll work on cleaning them up a bit over the next while - I just wanted to get the galleries up pretty soon so teams knew about them by the time January 8 rolled around.

10

I know the FIRST Mechanism Library has been a great resource for me, hopefully it has for the rest of you too.

I don’t think many pictures have been added to it in quite a while though. So, I call upon all of you to submit more pictures. I certainly have some to submit. Are the creators still willing to post some new pictures?

Let’s make this resource magnificent!

11

Yup, we will be updating this site before the 2006 season. I still need to harvest pictures from 2005, but I figured waiting until CD-Media is done would make my life a lot easier.

Anyone who has pictures that they think would make a nice addition, feel free to send them to [email protected] .