Hardware Education
Every build season, our hardware department is busy with the development and assembly of our robot. Unfortunately, there are no off-season events in Europe that our team can attend. However, this does mean that there is ample time during the off-season to work on fun internal projects!
The goal of these projects can be split up into two categories:
- Personal growth of the department members
- Improving the design and manufacturing process for the upcoming seasons
In this post we will zoom in on the first point. As mentioned in the first post, we strive to keep our students engaged when they leave high school in order for them to quickly become valuable mentors. This means we need an adequate challenge for everyone. In order to facilitate this we have several projects running at different levels. This goes from the initial exploratory phase, all the way to mastery.
Exploratory - New Skills Class 2 Program
When new students enter the team, they follow our Skills Classes. During their first year, they follow the general Skills Class 1 track together with all other new students. (More info on Skills Class 1 can be found in last year’s build thread)
Contrary to the Skills Class 1 program, Skills Class 2 (SC2) is handled by the individual (sub-)departments. During the off-season, we completely redesigned the Hardware SC2 program to be more in line with the desired future of the department. For the upcoming season, we have 7 students following SC2 within the team’s Hardware Department. This group is a mix between second year students and first year students with prior FTC experience.
During our team evenings, the students attend weekly lessons. Every lesson is designed to take 45 to 60 minutes with a mixture of practical skills and theoretical knowledge. The goal is to have the students get a basic understanding of every subject within the mechanical sub-department of the team. After following the program students should be capable of taking part in the discussions during build season and comprehend why certain design decisions are made.
The classes are taught by hardware mentors (who are generally young professionals in work life) in combination with the more experienced students (3+ years with the team) who developed the previous robot.
The lessons are divided into the following categories:
- Workshop Introduction
- Motors and Gearboxes
- Conceptual Design
- Power Transmission
- Production Methods
- 3D-printing
- Pneumatics
After the lesson the students can partake in building the robot designed by the experienced students to put their newly learned skills into action. The rework of the SC2 program aims to make students more engaged and ready for their first full build season with the Hardware Department.
Deepening - SolidWorks Lessons
To give people inside of our team the chance to dive deeper into SolidWorks we set up a set of SolidWorks lessons. These SolidWorks lessons are meant to increase the general knowledge of SolidWorks inside of our team, in practical terms this means that everyone inside of our team is allowed and encouraged to follow these lessons.
To test the knowledge they have gained during these lessons, we give our members the chance to get a CSWA (Certified SOLIDWORKS Associate) certificate. This is something we have done in the past for the whole team, but with the current size of the team this was not viable for the whole team and thus we focused on a smaller interested group.
Mastery - Off-season Robot Developed by Prospective Mentors
A group of experienced members (4-5 years within the team) wanted to design an off-season robot without any help from mentors to test their independence.
The members had from April till the summer break to finish the robot design. The end result is a cube runner robot containing a 12 motor swerve based on REV modules (the new rules regarding motors in the drivetrain had not been implemented at that time😉). It was made to be as small as possible with a result of a frame size of 17" by 17". The arm can fit exactly over the bumper so that cubes can be picked up from the ground without a hole in the bumper. They scheduled feedback sessions with experienced mentors by themselves. Then they made the parts and some parts were outsourced to be made by partners (again without help of mentors).
After the summer break most of the design was finished. This meant that the robot could be built. To make sure this was used as a learning experience for members of the team, this robot is being built by the skills class 2 students of hardware with guidance from the experienced members that designed the robot and other mentors from the hardware department.
Future Steps
We continue to improve our way to teach our students, members and mentors to improve our team. By using a learning curve from students to mentor we create an environment that will teach the next generation how to be an effective Hardware department member.