Simple Falcon 500 CAD

Technical CAD
#1

Does anyone have a simplified model of the Falcon 500 without all the fancy electronics and stuff inside of it? My computer starts to slow down quite a bit when I load in the model of a Falcon. Also, does anyone have a good way of mating falcon gears, pulleys, and couplers to the falcon shaft?

#2

If you go into the model tree of whatever software you’re using, I think you should be able to access the center axis of whatever you’re trying to mate. That’s what I do for Inventor.

#3

MKCad in Onshape has a pretty good simplified model. Also onshape’s mate system makes it really easy to mate pinions on falcons, but ymmv.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/2979144bb1e87ddd1747e172/v/c25edca823ea0fbb88112c8a/e/d1a86f57f624f4478eccbfa7

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#4

If you zoom in a lot and select the “flat” surface of a gears tooth, you can use a concentric mate between that and the bolt hole in the falcons shaft to mate them.

#5

If you’re using Solidworks, it might be a good time to get practiced with Lightweight Components. Being able to turn on/off full detail is a good skill to master.

As a specific argument for this method, it enables doing basic body design (motor placement, gear mesh, etc). When that’s all done, you can then turn ‘on’ the finer details (through-hole pins, connectors, etc) to do the cable routing. 99.9% of FRC robots don’t do cable routing, but learning foundational skills to enable future CAD skills is a good habit to get into.

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#6

I put a somewhat simplified falcon in here… under electronicKOP/motors.

(sorry when the library was started motors came from the KOP).

From what I saw that,the pcb was in the model that really added to the model complexity. I would suggest that vex/ctre could use the defeature tool in Solid works to help simplify the model.

https://workbench.grabcad.com/workbench/projects/gcvrZC3RKCMntpLqd2GGh9A1nQGgml761kBI1lApEW6Kdo#/space/gc0YhJybwsR-Wz4AEETiOVuHZ9VqD-wjim0wthA6rZXnAo/folder/1561062

#7

It’s a bit janky, but I use the ID of the spline on the pinions and mate it concentric (Solidworks) to the inside hole of the output shaft. After that I can use regular coincident, distance, etc. mates to position along the shaft.

#8

Using the top/right/front planes of the part files is a great way to mate things, and generally will help SW not slow down too much once you start having a lot of mates.

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#9

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