I was recently inspired by 8033’s heavily convoluted design process in 2023, along with some recent offseason posts by phenomenal teams talking about their design process, especially this post from BREAD 5940, to go down a major rabbit hole.
I wanted to answer the question: Can any team guarantee, through a robust workflow, with no experience of FRC game metas, that they will end up with a strategic robot that can play the game well?
There are many great posts and presentations about game analysis, strategic design and building a robot that is robust and minimizes failure points. Some of my favorites are @Michael_Corsetto’s original strategic design presentation (rollers are king) and @Karthik’s classic FRC presentations (don’t miss them at champs!).
But, I think there has been a shortage of information about the specific workflow that you can follow to “check all those boxes”. It’s really hard to give such a presentation since there have been so many different ways that teams go about designing and building a robot. But given the recent uptick in teams using Onshape due to the discontinuation of GrabCAD, and the more systematic process that Onshape encourages, I thought there might be more space for a more detailed workflow presentation now.
The fruits of my efforts is this slide deck, which I’ve titled “Meta-Strategic Design Workflows in OnShape”. The term “meta-strategic design” refers to the strategy and methods surrounding wider robot architecture - E.G. before the subsystem brainstorming stage.
Some of you might know that I gave an early version of this as presentation at WRRF a couple weeks back, and it went pretty decently. That was kind of like a beta, and since then I’ve added several new slides and a ton of new content to make it more useful. In my original talk, I didn’t take enough time to explain what Masterketches at their core really are and how to do them step-by-step. So I think there’s space for an updated series of videos or presentation using this newer deck. If I decide to make a new video or present somewhere with it I’ll send it here.
There are many, many elements here that are super debatable, but it’s gotten to the point where I’d like to share it with the community and see how it’s received. Tons of people in the FRC community are far more knowledgable than me (I’m just a student on 8033), and I’m sure theres ton’s to add. Please give feedback so I can improve it!!
As a final note, HUGE thanks to 5940, 973, 5460, 3512, 6657, and others for visuals and resources that I used here. Not only have your rescources allowed me to make this presentation, but they have seriously fundamentally changed how I see FRC, and I really appreciate all the knowledge you are sharing. If any of ya’ll would prefer me to remove your images / CAD, shoot me a DM and I’ll do it ASAP.
Anyways, here it is. Let me know what ya’ll think.
P.S. if anyone does the hands on portion on their own (slide 22) let me know how it goes!
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