i’m too lazy to stack spacers so this has changed my life
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This is insanity! what’s next? A big pivot featurescript?
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“Introducing: A Featurescript That CADs Your Robot For You!”
Note
This is a joke. we will not be doing that. yet
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hmm that gives me an idea
Please don’t start with "what if we stuff 7 desgin leads inside a computer and offer it as ‘FrcDesgin intelligence’ " I have my concerns about that
Edit: did I see this marked as solution for a sec 
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ChatDDS in development as we speak
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Configurable Tube Crush Blocks
Since the beginning of FRCDesign.org we’ve been talking about leveraging tube plugs to build superstructures and subassemblies. Often times this requires designing around crush blocks, especially when using thin-wall tube. Designing printed crush blocks just got a lot easier!
This is the second of many configurable parts we are planning to add to FRCdesign.org. Find them on the configurables page.
With these blocks you can configure just about everything; from print tolerance, tube size, wall thickness, number of holes, and more. But the defaults are such that these should be two-click additions to most assemblies. Flanges are also optional and can be added to make assembly more foolproof. The design leverages teardrop holes in order to make printing easier. They should always be printed upright.
Check out the CAD here.
We hope that additions like these save a few clicks and make the process of designing a robot just a little more enjoyable, especially when designing for practice. On that topic, we’ve been working on the transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2 and will be announcing additional content between the stages in the next few days.
Admittedly the doge meme remains relevant.
-FRCDesign.org team
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This stuff is awesome. Keep up the amazing work!!
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Learning Course Pages Split!
Sorry for the late post. Based on feedback we’ve gotten from many different sources, we’ve worked on splitting the pages of the FRCDesign.org learning course into smaller pages to make sure no student misses an exercise or step. It also should make the content more digestible.
A Few More Changes
A few more changes have been made alongside the splitting of pages.
The table of contents for learning course pages has been deleted, and for all non- learning course pages has been moved to the right.
The workflow for modeling belts and chain in Stage 1B has been reworked for the Origin Cube and Belt and Chain gen featurescripts.
The site is also now sponsored by Fabworks! We have a few costs to get some extra features for the site and Fabworks was willing to sponsor us for them. This will not affect the content of the site, but if you need custom laser cut parts for your robot, check out Fabworks! Thank you!
-FRCDesign.org Team
P.S. Some more changes will be coming soon to help smooth out the transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2.
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4414 has been training EVERY student on the team with the learning course and so far the experience has been awesome.
Was glad I could support this project.
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Coming up
Educator’s Guide
We’ve drafted an educator’s guide! Since the learning course is not necessarily designed for teaching, we’re working on a guide to make it easier to help your students learn design from an educator’s perspective.
If you have tried using this to teach your students, we would like to get in contact to learn more about your experience as we develop the educator’s guide.
Send me a DM and include @AndrewCard if you are interested.
Thank you!
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Learning Course Updates
Thank you for all the student and mentor feedback for the website and learning course!
We’ve received feedback that there was a major difficulty spike between Stage 2A and 2B. One major difficulty for learning engineering design in FRC is the jump between learning how to CAD (Stage 1) and making intentional design decisions (Stage 2). Students who start trying to design a mechanism with their ideas while not completely comfortable with the CAD software may be left feeling overwhelmed and stuck.
Because of this, we have restructured the learning course slightly and added eight new practice mechanisms to Stage 1, gradually easing the difficulty and level of guidance to make the stage 1 to 2 transition smoother.
Pictured Above: two of the new practice exercises.
Stage 1 Restructure and Objectives
The idea of Stage 1 is to get a student completely comfortable with the CAD software and workflow in Onshape.
The order of Stage 1 has been changed and updated:
- 1A: Design Fundamentals (small edits)
- Learn and practice the base functions of Onshape and learn the very basics about designing in FRC
- 1B: Power Transmissions (small edits)
- Learn relevant modeling techniques for modeling power transmission
- 1C: Practice Mechanisms (new)
- Follow a series of 8 practice mechanisms to help introduce and continually practice CAD skills, the usage of COTS parts, and the modeling of power transmissions. These mechanisms will get less guided as you progress through them to help transition to later stages where less guidance is provided.
- 1D: Design Methodology (Old 1C, Basic Swerve Drivetrain)
- Begin learning how to implement top-down design in the context of a robot and start modeling their first subsystem (a swerve drivetrain)
- 1E: Subsystem Workflow (Old 2A, Detailed Swerve Drivetrain)
- Learn the workflow of modeling a subsystem, where after the base parts are modeled and added to the assembly, new parts and modifications are made to finish detailing it out.
Once you get comfortable with the CAD software, you begin to work on mechanism design in Stage 2. This will also teach you how to make intentional design decisions.
Stage 2 Changes
In the coming weeks, stage 2 will also be updated to better reflect the real process of continuous revision during the build season. For example, for the shooter project, students will first model the shooter without back rollers. Then, they will go back and create the necessary modifications to add the back rollers.
Please post any issues you find on the GitHub! The Educator’s guide is also still in the works. Stay posted as we continue to make progress!
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Oh, also the slides have been fixed now and shouldn’t cause problems before a reload. Just had to move some style and javascript code global. Let us know if you have any more issues.
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Hotdogs
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A good resource you could introduce would be NASA’s RAP design book. NASA RAP Robotics Design Guide – Robotics Alliance Project
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RAP has been an inspiration for us over the development of FRCDesign so far- there’s no doubt there’s tons of useful information in there. In fact, early versions of the learning guide made by @howlongismyname ages ago used to lean on it a lot as a direct part of the curriculum.
These days, we recognize that RAP has a much larger scope than our project in its current form, and in includes a lot of information that isn’t applicable to most teams, or at least doesn’t make much sense to employ in the 2024 FRC landscape. For those two reasons alone we’ve largely moved away from linking to external resources, with the exception of Onshape classroom (and this is something we’d like to break away from at some point too).
In a sense, we want to create a highly focused and current design guide - so we’ve kept the scope appropriately sized for our content, and we’ve avoided linking to external resources, which can often overwhelm students and can quickly become outdated. While I don’t think we’ll ever link RAP as a direct part of the guide, it’s definitely reasonable to think that as our scope expands a lot of those additional topics will be moved over, though much of the information will likely have to be updated.
If you’ve got specific things that you think the guide is really missing, we’d love to hear them!
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This site is awesome!
If the West Coast Products Inline Elevator Bearings are going to be off backorder sometime this offseason we plan on building one of the elevators.
Our team recently has experienced some moving on from mechanical students and mentors leaving a big gap. This resource might quite literally be saving our season (trying not to be dramatic but it really is helpful).
Thank you!
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To comment on the WCP portion. We have a ton of elevator blocks (all three) going into stock soon.
We spent some time streamlining more of production so backorders are much shorter going fwd.
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oh this is fantastic news! I actually just emailed you guys on my way into work this morning wondering if I could get a rough ballpark on when those blocks might be back (which I know might be a tough to answer question haha, but trying to plan fall projects and wanted to know if it was in the cards). Out of curiosity, is soon on the weeks scale?
Should be sometime next week. Awaiting for hardware to arrive!
The elevator blocks going forward should stay in stock pretty well.
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