My team currently has our CAD and build teams as one ‘department.’ We’ve tried separating them in the past, and it didn’t go so well, but I’m willing to consider trying again. It’s my senior year, so I’m looking at big-picture changes, long-term team impact, etc.
Teams whose CAD and builders are separate; why do you do it?
Teams whose aren’t separate; why not?
Our Mechanical team does all their own CAD, which gets passed along to Electrical for them to plan out the electronics board. I’ve found that for some students, doing their own CAD requires they fully understand what it is they’re trying to build. I think it would benefit us to have a CAD point person though to ensure that everything lines up across all the different mechanisms and committees.
Ours aren’t separate, for both a philosophical and practical reason:
I am of the opinion, that less regimentation is almost always the right amount of regimentation.
We have teams, but there is lots of overlap (we only have ~30 kids) esp. between CAD, manufacturing, and assembly. Cross-pollination is a good thing. “Throwing things over the wall” is not.
We also encourage any member to come and help with assembly (chairmans, graphics, etc). One cool result of this was a member who had mostly stuck to the non-technical side of the team, tried her hand out at the technical side this year and she was awesome. In fact, she was one of our pit reps at our regional.
One team I know has the CAD team following the designers around with rulers, to document what has been built.
Another team has the design team CADding what needs to be built, and handing that paperwork to the fabricators.
Yet another team CADs everything then fabricates and assembles it, since there too few people to split up the work.
How does it work on your team? CAD first or parts first?
Our team is pretty small (about 12ish) so everyone pretty much had multiple roles on the team. Is there a reason you want to separate the departments? For my team right now we have a lot of overlap and even if the team grows I think there will be some students who will still have multiple roles on the team. I don’t think having an overlap is a bad thing but having people focus and specialize in a department can make them very good at their roles.
From my personal, admittedly limited experience, it always helps to know/do a little bit of everything in robotics. Considering your team size and past experiences as well, I think keeping CAD and build together would probably work best.
We make rough jigs in cad to prototype stuff like geometry these cads often get reused as the basis sketches for the main product, these get cutout tested and revises a few times adjusting things which then get a production cad then get, cut out of aluminum, or polycarb, for real robot production
We generally CAD first. Team of 45ish, where 20 are the CAD/Build department.
My motivation is mostly just that there are some teams that do it, and I want to know why. Maybe they have a good reason, maybe I’m missing out, etc.
My team slaps together a prototype of some kind without CAD on the Monday after kickoff. They then test it and put together a CAD model, and then they switch back to building it. The entire mechanical team is building or CADing. We are a small team, so that might make it work better, but it’s worked so far.
5987 united the build and CAD subteams into a single engineering subteam around the time i joined the team. I started out as a machinist on the build side and got more and more into CAD over time. I think the best case in favor of not seperating them is just how much better the CAD becomes once your designers actually know how the robot is built. Having hands-on experience with machining and using the tools in your workshop i think is the best thing to do if you want to be a better designer, and having both things in the same subteam makes it kind of a “natural progression”- members usually start out with machining in their sophomore year and then learn CAD as they progress into junior and senior. Not that first year students can’t be good at CAD, but it does require more experience.
+1
I have worked with many designers (electronics and mechanical) who don’t understand the processes used to manufacture what they are designing. Their design output is typically inferior to the design output of those who do understand the manufacturing processes. This is why there are concepts such as DFM and DFS.
What was the problem of having them as one team this year, that is prompting a change toward something that has been unsuccessful in the past?
I think this is an important lesson for students to learn.
This past weekend, we had a motor spit out a slight bit of smoke. Several students start scrambling to run and grab replacement parts and immediately start removing this part of the robot.
I stopped them all, and asked a simple question:
"What evidence do you have that the motor needs to be replaced right now?
They all stopped and looked at me and said, “There was a little smoke.”
Which is true. The motor is probably not in 100% shape, right now. Should we change it before we get to the qualification matches of our district championship next week? Probably. Is it unfit for further testing, wear, and otherwise use? Who knows, we saw the smoke and shut the robot off.
The overall point of that anecdote is, your intuition or gut feeling may be correct. There may be a problem that needs to be solved, right now. The question is, can you articulate the problem, and why you think separating the teams will solve THAT problem, without introducing OTHER problems that are worse?
Its worked very well for us, only about 3 years ago were we big enough to create a dedicated CAD team. We finalize CAD before moving to build so many CAD members are also build, while keeping a dedicated set of hands on CAD so make revisions as needed. Our first year we did end up having a dedicated cad team all season because we were slow but as workflow becomes more efficient that time came down to 3 weeks this year. I would recommend a Kahn Bahn board to keep track and dedicate people to a subsystem so they know it very well.
Our model is different from all those posted so far here, so I will share in hopes that it gives another possible way forward to consider.
CAD is part of our Strategy quadrant, and not part of build (Mechanical quadrant). Strategy for us includes design priorities for game play and team resources, CAD design, drive team, coaching, and scouting.
This puts CAD work chronologically ahead of build, allowing us to manufacture more accurately and quickly. We make parts primarily on a CNC router and a manual mill. CAD designers make sure the manufacturing team have CAM files and accurate drawings, and help check for tolerance of parts before assembly.
Looking at the even bigger picture, we’ve found the most productive students are those who are multifaceted. Some may specialize in one area due to personal preference, but having knowledge across all the sub-disciplines in robotics is a big plus in FRC as well as in the professional world. Most of our rookie students tend to gravitate towards one specialty, but we encourage our students to jump from specialty to specialty every year, if they want to. A programmer who knows how to wire the robot, and who has built parts, is more valuable than one who maintains a strict focus on programming only. Same goes for the other subteam disciplines, even if just from the point of view of troubleshooting when something is wrong. It’s way easier for specialists to blame the other discipline when there is a problem. A robot is a complex system of interrelated disciplines, and the best engineers understand how software, electronics, and mechanisms compliment each other to become an elegant working robot. Ultimately, FRC exists to nudge students into STEM careers. It can do that best by allowing students to explore all the different aspects of robot building, so they can find their passion.
In short, rather than trying to separate your design and build teams, try instead to fully integrate them, so all the students have the ability to design and build parts and assemblies. Then allow those students who lean towards design or those who prefer to build stuff to drift that way. Designers who don’t build stuff tend to be bad designers. And, understanding what part features are truly important to a design, and which are not, allows builders to work more efficiently and scrap fewer parts.
Whenever I have this discussion with my students, it comes back to: what do you think will work best for your team, given your team priorities? Our team is huge (about 90 students), we have no barriers to entry or requirements to be on the team, and we want everyone to feel like they have the opportunity to make useful contributions to the team - this is one of our team priorities. The effect is that we have some kids who show up every day, and some who show up maybe once a week - how can we make them all feel like they can make useful contributions? One of our answers was to split into separate Design/CAD and Fabrication subteams. We tell the students deciding between Design and Fabrication subteams at the beginning of the year that we recommend that they think about how much time they plan to commit to robotics, and if it’s on the once-a-week end, they should probably join Fabrication because once they learn how to use the tools, whenever they do show up, someone can hand them a part to make and they will still feel like they are making a useful contribution. The people in Fab end up having to learn some CAD, so they still have the chance to learn that skill, and they can always switch subteams in the future. This helps takes away the team’s frustration of CAD not getting done because the person isn’t there, and also the frustration of the student who may have started CADding something, only to come back a week later and find that the team has made a different decision and eliminated all their work. Overall this system of having the subteams split has worked well for us - but it works well for us because it was an intentional decision aligned with our team priorities, not because we think it’s the absolute best way to build a robot.
The team I am mentoring had a single “Build” team relating to anything mechanical on the robot. This turned into just turned into 2 members doing a majority of the work mainly due to the required amount of knowledge in CAD, Cam, manufacturing, and assembly being really high. New team members were likely being overwhelmed with knowledge to learn, in addition to only having the 2 build team members that must teach everyone these skills. I don’t doubt your system works with your team, especially seeing your teams amazing robot. But there must be something were doing wrong with our team organization. I was mainly curious if you have a single build team how do you teach/train students each of these subcategories effectively to be ready for the season?
I really like this system, but do you encounter any issues with older members not being great at CAD because they just started later? We start our rookies on CAD as soon as they come in so they have as much time to develop as possible.