Hello people of Chief Delphi, team lead from CORE 2062 here. This past season some judges ask for an engineering notebook from us. We also had a mentor this year who told us to start making a notebook. He told us that it helped track how things are going with the team. I am asking for ideas in starting an engineering notebooks and maybe some examples from other team. Do we try to add a update every meeting on things are going for each of our sub teams. From a design perspective we could put on changes we made to CAD. Would this be benefitable for our team?
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A very good place to start looking is FTC. To be eligeble for awards, they are required to submit an engineering notebook. Some of the ones that I saw while wandering around the pits at worlds were absolutely fantastic.
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One thing we did that worked well was to make a channel in discord. Every day, a handful of students were responsible for making a post about what they did that day. We later compiled the raw logs into a summary of what was done over the weeks of the build.
There might be more efficient ways to do it, but that was a great way to start collecting the raw data.
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We partnered with our schools PLTW program which makes engineering note books to not only help us with starting out with it but also as recruitment for the team so we share our facilities with them and they share their knowledge of things like engineering notebooks and Lots of CAD.
We do a similar thing. A student is chosen to be responsible for an update at the end of every build day. Typically this is a highly involved student on the design team because it works best if they were there. They collect reports from the other subteam leads (eg controls, etc) and post a summary of the day to slack each night.
FTC has removed the requirement for an Engineering Notebook, and replaced it with an Engineering Portfolio, which is a 15 page document. There are some great historical engineering notebooks from FTC, but I would look at them with a critical eye, since the rules at the time incentivized padding notebooks and… inventive… levels of detail.
Teams do still create notebooks, but they are explicitly not a core requirement for awards anymore.
Check out FTC 7842 (https://ftcbrowncoats.org/engineering-ntbk/).
I had the pleasure of speaking with them at worlds and had the opportunity to look at their notebook. Here’s one they uploaded from a few years ago
I assume they didn’t intentionally change things to discourage it, but I imagine if they hadn’t done this judges would also have to be reading through notebooks written by a few thousand graphics cards in California this season.
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