FIRST Technical Resources

I’m looking to put together an extensive library of resources for my team to use. I think having as much information as possible condensed into a single location will help with student learning and the technical development of our team. What resources have each of you found most useful or helpful? This can be PowerPoint presentations, team websites, Youtube videos, white papers, design calculators, CD threads, or any other form of media. Thanks for the help!

Are you looking at anything in particular? I have a whole lot of random stuff that I’m happy to share (especially if you’re interested in long list of drivetrain-related things) but I’m not sure how specific you want the resources. Some of the more general things:

  • A link to CD and instructions on how to search. Probably the most useful thing you can teach someone in 5 seconds.
  • JVN calculator (link)
  • 1114’s resource section (link)
  • 3847’s consolidation of resources (link)
  • 973 RAMP videos (link)
  • 610’s design tutorials (link)

Looking for engineering notebooks / build season blogs / other similar things are also useful, but I don’t keep those links. A search on CD should bring them up though.

You could also just look through team websites to see what there is (HOF teams are a good place to start).

In general though, my experience is that if it’s FRC related, CD has the answers and if it’s more general, Google does.

Apart from the above post, I use google as follows:
“<insert search term> site:chiefdelphi.com”
Appending the “site:chiefdelphi.com” makes it look only at CD. This is basically what I use to learn about new things in FRC. I could use the search function in CD, but I find that just googling is faster and tends to get me what I want anyway.

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Build-your-Everything-Really-Really-Fast/?ALLSTEPS

This is perfect. I already encourage my students to check and read Chief Delphi frequently, but I also want to have some more general resources readily available to them (in addition to training from our team) that they can easily look through when they don’t have a specific question. Thanks!

I have also done the same thing for my team. I am constantly adding stuff so it might seem unorganized.

Check it out here.

Presentations at MSC in 2013 are pretty interesting to watch.

http://www.fightingpi.org/podcasts/Picasts.shtml

Especially check out Paul Copioli’s presentation on mechanisms. I find myself using the Excel sheet quite a bit. The chain calculator in there is especially useful.

This is a great thread with many useful resources.

I’m building a tutorial that goes through an Octocanum drive train design (but includes research and calculations that are useful for other drivetrains and robot mechanisms too). http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=137711

Also, if anyone else out there is using social media to share resources (which has advantages and disadvantages relative to forums in my opinion), I’d love to know about it. I’m trying it out with https://www.facebook.com/CrowdSourceRobotics but would gladly join a more-established community.

Wow. This is amazing. Thank you!