We hope everyone at champs had as great of a time as we did!
We are gearing up for the summer and had a few things we were hoping to do this year that we wanted the community’s feedback on.
1. Summer help hours
One of our ideas was to have our employees (many of whom are robotics engineers and FRC alums) available for “summer office hours.” The idea being that teams could setup a time to chat with one of our engineers to do a design review of their robot, ask questions about manufacturing, or really anything else teams would find useful.
2. Summer webinars
Our second idea was to host webinars over the summer with a range of topics. Some of the ideas we had are:
How to CAM 101 (computer aided machining)
How to pick motors and gear ratios
How to design parts that are easy to make
How to pick tolerances
CNC machining 101 (g-code, tool offsets, work offsets)
If anyone has other topics that you would like to learn about or think other teams would benefit from, please leave a reply.
We are trying to learn how we can best help out and be involved with the FIRST community.
Sam
EDIT: I realized I didn’t leave anyway to us to follow-up. If you want to hear more information about this as we formalize it, just add yourself to this list: https://goo.gl/forms/qkiRUSpANwmB7Pl53
EDIT 2: Just to clarify, we are a sponsor, not a team.
I think if you can your should also talk a bit about programming in addition to just the mechanical and design aspects of a teams bot. I also think that it would be cool to compare / contrast different programming languages (C++, Java, Lab View)
I think this will be really cool for teams that meet over the summer, and ever cooler for those who go over the design of the previous year’s robot to see what they could have done better.
If you go through with the webinars, which would be amazing, you should see if there’s a way to record and upload them online for anyone unable to tune in
For sure! We will definitely record and put them up on our website.
Still not sure about the logistics of how we will run them; however, we may end up just pre-recording them if it’s hard to find times that enough people are available.
I’m all for the idea of webinars. Torque had a similar concept a while back about “Torque Tutorials” that were in essence what you described. I think a standardized and comprehensive database of informative videos could help everyone.
Any idea where I could find these videos? We’re currently looking for previous approaches to find what worked and what didn’t.
One of our longer term goals is to create a help center with all sorts of engineering reference documents. I’ve seen multiple teams do things like this in the past; however, I am hoping that we will be able to leverage our resources as a company to keep it more up-to-date and extensive.