I test drove it last week and was blown away. I think it’s the single best course someone has made for FRC for teaching a topic. I’ll be delighted to send students to frcdesign.org to learn about CAD for FRC.
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For the sub-document setup why do you suggest having a static assembly? Is it just if someone once to look at it without having there computer struggle they can?
Having a static assembly will typically increase the performance of the final assembly. It lets Onshape create a hierarchy of mates to solve, with your motion mates being solved at the end of the process. This in most cases will decrease the overall mate solve time. Plus it makes each individual part easier to work on since nothing is trying to move around.
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I’m a big fan of this site and excited to see how to grows and evolves in the future. Sections 0-2 are at a pretty good point where I feel like you could give it to a student and just have them learn on their own enough to generally know what components are and how to generally design a mechanism. I think with additional exercise prompts added based on previous historic mechanisms from teams, this could take students pretty far.
I’ll be interested to see how section 3 ends up, as I think learning how to do master sketches and layout a full robot concept, handle system integration between mechanisms, and other high level processes are what really takes someone to the next level of really being able to design a competitive and high-functioning FRC robot. This is of course some of the hardest aspects of FRC design, but also what really starts to separate students when they get into college and well into their professional lives.
I also think doing some steps based on a similar approach to Orion’s (3005) Block CAD presentation he gave at the mentor conference would be smart to add to section 3 (or maybe this could be a section 4, and move the planned section 4 to be section 5). I really think a lot of teams would benefit from utilizing the Concept/Master Sketch stage > Block CAD stage > Mechanism design workflow.
Last thought I had, creating similar sites for other core FRC skills such as programming, manufacturing, and electrical would be very cool to see, especially if all of these then came together in a central site of how they work together. This could basically grow into a really nice encompassing curriculum of sorts following a similar structure to what has been set up here for design, perhaps all of them even using similar/same example mechanisms and robots to promote parallel development in those skill trees.
Anyway, great work to everyone who has helped make this site happen so far.
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finally an announcement came out! Never thought I’d see the day
(i’m so excited, nice work lol)
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This seems like a great resource! Do you have an estimate of how many hours it would take for a student to get through each section?
To be honest this is gonna vary a ton based on the student - both in terms of their ability to focus and previous experience with CAD (and making things in general).
If you had a student who is already somewhat mechanically inclined and is able to focus for longer periods of time, getting through stages 0 and 1 might take them anywhere from 3-6 hours, maybe a bit more or less.
It’s best to avoid skimming and if you’re teaching a group, presenting some of the long info pages in a live format can help with engagement.
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Interesting…maybe someone plays too much Minecraft…
(FYI Sodium is an optimization mod for minecraft)
Amazing site btw, cant wait to look more into it
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dude FRCdesign is so good! It helped me make a painless switch from fusion 360, and it is honestly one of the most polished learning resources I’ve used in a while. (also sorry David for spoiling it early)
Very neat
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Same vibes
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It would be great if we can extend this concept to CAM using a program such as Mastercam. I get that the current focus is on design and yet we are making physical robots, not just virtual ones. There are a number of manufacturing considerations to take into account during design, especially given that we need quick turn-around on parts, whether we make them ourselves or have assistance from sponsors.
Design for manufacturing is definitely something we want to cover, probably in the design handbook, but I doubt we will stray into CAM specific resources.
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This is the thing that I have being hoping for years!
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couldn’t be more proud of y’all – I definitely could’ve used this back when I was in high school
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This is Kelly, one of the main contributors. This is a long term thing, and we still have some more edits planned for the current content of the learning course, but it will continue to get better through feedback from students going through the course.
Do they feel like they need more practice? Is it too boring at places? Are there any sudden increases in difficulty? Are any parts confusing?
The feedback from students going through the course is extremely valuable, so we’d greatly appreciate if either mentors could make sure we get feedback from the students or students going through the course separately can comment here or create an issue through github if they need to.
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We have been using this for training and it’s been awesome! Last season we tried to use the official onshape training, but not much was frc relevant which caused kids to lose interest. It’s been great using this website as everyone can now jump straight into designing for frc. It’s also been a great way to set a standard for design best practices with team projects.
Great work and many thanks to everyone who has helped build this!
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frcdesign is love frcdesign is life
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David and collaborators,
Great job. Best thing FRC in a long time.
Joel
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This is a great resource! Thank you so much to all the contributors. We’ve already passed it out to our team (1648) as our new official CAD and Design teaching material.
If you need it, I’d be happy to help contribute to the 3D printing section! Topics I’d be happy to help with include: mechanical parts that can be 3D printed (pulleys, herringbone gears, belts, etc), material selection, print orientation, nozzle size, how to export to a 3D printable file, and calling out helpful OnShape featurescripts and configurables.
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