Kickoff Seminar Input - Mechanical Design

Technical Technical Discussion
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Happy new year CD!

Doing a short kickoff seminar on the broad topic of “Mechanical Design for FRC” and I have a good amount of material. My concern is that it is overly biased by my own experience as a mentor in FRC. I would love to get opinions from others on their favorite tidbits from mechanical seminars like this over the years. I am particularly interested in getting input from students or former students who benefited from these types of short talks - what stuck with you and how did it help?

Thanks!

-matto-

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I think something that really stuck with me was Mike Corsetto’s saying of “Steal from the best, invent the rest”. I know that is from a strategic design presentation, but I think it is definetly worth incorporating for a mechanical desgin presentation. I think it helped me (and other students) understand how many FRC games are similar and that many design principles are reused in mechanisms by the top teams over the years.

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  • Read all the rules. Twice.
  • Nobody makes perfect parts, so design with this in mind. (sometimes slots are better than holes).
  • Game piece dimensions will vary.
  • Field dimensions will vary from CAD, from the wooden team built versions, and from event to event.
  • Don’t build robot to max dimension. Be 1" under.

A mechanical solution must handle all these variations. Compliance is your friend (think thin polycarbonate, springs, rubbers, etc.).

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Things I have learned from my FLL mentors:
“Keep it Simple, Stupid”
“Don’t build a monstrosity”
“You know what happens when you assume…”
There’s also the “if it’s stupid and it works, it isn’t stupid” but YMMV.

Speaking of, LEGO is a great prototyping tool for FRC!

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A caveat to this is that one should not “copy without understanding”. Otherwise, it is very easy to miss important details that make the design work.

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I totally agree with what you are saying. I would NEVER suggest “stealing” something from a high level team and not knowing how it works. This will become very obvious in judging for robot related awards. However, I still think it is very valuable to see how high performing teams responded to certain game objectives and the types of mechanisms that performed well vs. the mechanisms that did not perform very well in a particular game.

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