I’m decently comfortable with Solidworks and strategic design, with my main weakness being actual mechanism design and engineering. If people could send resources to improve on this that would be great!
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Best thing you can do is find people who will give you feedback, CAD stuff, and send it to them. The important thing is to make sure the people you’re getting feedback from actually know what they’re doing. I recommend finding mentors whose teams win a lot of competitions 
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Practice practice practice. And check out all the public/open alliance cad posts. It’s very illuminating to see what some of the top teams (all teams actually) are doing.
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Copy the best teams’ CAD. I learned a lot by looking at 1678’s CAD and copying it myself, it teaches you how the top teams design, also don’t just copy it, try to understand why they made the design decisions that they did.
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I have found 3847 Spectrum’s design explorations accessible here helpful.
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The best way I’ve found to improve on this is to actually design critical parts. I’ve designed dozens of parts like prosthetic hands, legs, arms, and shoulders, medical braces, mounts for different parts/objects, hand-cranked tools, ect. while trying to make most of the parts 3D printable. You have to then criticise the absolute s*** out of the part and try to find the bad things about your design and refine it. Start with an overcomplicated, feature-ridden part and refine/criticise it down until you get something reasonable and easy to make and use.
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We’re planning to make more of these this fall, if anyone has ideas for robots they’d like to see (need to have published CAD) let me know.
I would add: Prototype!
Often the difference between a good idea that worked great and a good idea that didn’t work so well may come down to one (or a handful) of critical dimensions. Figuring out what those are before you are building is a huge win.
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2910? 1678?
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Seconded. Also is 1538 releases cad. 6328 as well.
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Although looking at other designs and practicing CADding is a good supplement, I think it would be useful for OP to learn about different types of mechanical linkages and power transmission systems one can implement in an arm system, and how making physical changes result in modifications to arm length, torque/speed, and CG/stability.
This is the basis for what I train in the fall to help students think about how prototypes can fit together. OP, if this is what you’re looking for I can try to point you in a few directions.
To start, I like to show off one of my favorite Lego-based mechanical linkage videos to give a simplified idea of what types of actuation can be achieved mechanically:
Would FRC-centric mechanism design guidance be more of what you’re looking for?
8177 2023
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Consider taking a Statics course! Taking Statics grants you x-ray vision, enabling you to visualize how forces flow through a rigid structure.
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Build stuff. Doesn’t matter exactly what. Better yet, build stuff with only the materials you have on-hand instead of ordering the exact right solution. This will force you to be creative. We call this ‘getting back from the moon’, e.g. you’re on Apollo 13 and you have what you have and you must make it work to survive.
Disassemble stuff. Consider what the designer must have been thinking when they created it. You will learn many new methods for design and assembly.
Break stuff. Ideally test something until failure. Analyze the failure mode and consider what design changes could have prevented or prolonged the failure. Couple this activity with the above two for the best learning experience.
Edit: none of this has to be (or even should be) FRC-related.
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Oh gawd, bad memories. Statics is why I switched to EE 
Like many of the folks on CD I’ve been mentoring FRC for over a decade. My advice echoes that of many previous replies, look back through the archives and understand the best bots from the last 10 years. Most robots consist of a few essential design elements, drive base, intake, primary and secondary scoring mechs. Dedicate an hour a day to study past designs, you might be surprised to see how simple some of the best bots are, and how often designs are recycled and retrofit each year.
What I advise my student is to (1) learn frc history back at least 10 years (2) identify similarities and differences between top competitors for each year. (3) compare those deigns between years with similar scoring objectives and identify design trends. (4) try your hand at reproducing some designs then share your design with someone who’s been around a while for review.
If you don’t have someone to review your designs, I’m sure there are loads of people here on CD that would happily help guide you!
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