one of my friends wrote this as a robot design resource.
I have not read the whole thing (yet), but it looks like Charles did an excellent job on this. It’s not FRC specific, but it looks to be a good general purpose reading.
I had the pleasure of working with Charles for a couple of years when he was one of the founding student members of 1771.
I took a 5 week version of the 2.007 class during the MITES program and from skimming this guide, I think it would be definitely useful for any FRC team.
I like it. A lot.
Lots of cool tricks in there. It also reads as if he is speaking, really letting you experience his design philosophy from the top level. Always a neat experience to hear that.
He almost lost me after the third page of finger joints, but overall this was a great read. I’ll have to come back in the future to dig into some more of the links.
Another must-read for FRC teams looking to expand their knowledge & capabilities! Thanks for posting.
I still haven’t had a chance to get through all of this - a welcome thing in a world full of twitter and anything longer than two paragraphs is tl;dr - but I like what I see so far.
Many, many teams could learn a thing or two about simple design philosophy and I’d recommend to almost anyone that they read and internalize the content here two or three times before designing another west coast drive.
eh?
I just mean to say that a lot of people design through mimicry and don’t really seem to understand a lot of the ‘why’ behind the choices they’re copying. The west coast drive is my favorite example since it’s the thing that everyone here likes to model in CAD over and over again.
I think that, instead of modeling another iteration of a drive train, some folks could use a crash course in general, simple principles of design that can help guide them when there isn’t a really prevalent, successful design for them to copy.
gotcha, fair point.
I assumed you were implying that a WCD was inherently less efficient to make, not your point.
Your point is very valid, and one I completely agree with. Copying without understanding is better than nothing, but it’s really not desirable.
Amen. 
Thank you for verbalizing something I’ve been thinking for a long time. (Though, it is good that people are at least CADing something…)
That’s the way I’ve always looked at it.
And they usually get lots of feedback and they learn something. And have fun doing it.
To me it is more dangerous when they are implementing some system on their competition, but don’t understand the inherent trade offs present; they just do it because they saw someone else do it. (Worst offenders of this, IMHO? Swerve Drive. Mecanum Wheels. West Coast Drive.)
I do like it when someone posts a design, mentions one of those generalities and is asked “WHY?” by someone else (Ether, you seem to be the one asking that a lot these days.)
Oops… we hijacked a thread.
The original linked Instructable is really cool! It contains a few really great nuggets of wisdom!
-John
I’ve been following Charles’ blog for a while now. He has some very cool design break downs and this guide is great as well.
One of the things he links to is the Fundamentals of Design by Professor Alexander Slocum (He’s an FRC mentor by the way). I found it about a month ago and have been going through the whole course. For anyone that didn’t have formal mechanical engineering training it’s a fantastic guide to design. I got to learn the names of a bunch things that I’ve sort of figured out over the years but never knew they had names.