So last year was our first year designing the entire robot in Inventor before too much was made, but many of the parts we still brute forced together ourselves. It was a learning curve since none of our mentors know Inventor, but we figured it out.
This year, 100% of the upper assembly was designed before anything was bought/made. 50 Part files and over 100 manfactured parts (and a lot of waiting), all of our parts came back and our upper robot was assembled, locked to the chassis and wired in a day and a half!!
I will post better photos when we get them (and we are still waiting for a few last parts, so it will look a little different, but I have to say, it was amazing that we used pneumatics for the first time this year, and all of our parts worked nearly exactly as we expected them to. Amazing!! (Im still waiting for something to go wrong… Ive never seen a robot assembled and working that quickly!!)
Finally our programmers & drivers get some time with it!
I did that with our drive train this year. Aside from the chains, everything went together very quickly once we got it back from being powder coated. It also took no time at all to cut things. Next year we’ll look for ways to get rid of the chains.
I tried to do that for our lift, but we used 80/20. Trying to mate anything to 80/20 in Solidworks effectively kills the assembly down the line, as it seems that none of the mates seem to save properly, nor are there pre-made templates. I wound up using placeholders but the dimensions are still off from what the real robot has. Then on top of that there’s so much shifting and adjusting and “omg! I forgot to put a slider there for another screw! Take this apart!” crap.
Very nice! We did a lot of Inventor work this year, but still are not to the point where we can say we actually designed the whole robot first…too many things changed as we prototyped and played with the design…and the team’s “fast” computer died in week 3!
Most of our chassis was designed with Inventor, and it went together very easily (although it wasn’t a CAD/CAM process, unless you consider students running manual tools to be computer aided machines?)
We typically design the robot in Inventor each year as well. Not only does it help with fit and spacing on the robot, but we can also “test” the robot early on using simple models of field components. I agree that it really helps in the long run…if you have the manpower.
Though the concepts are worked out ahead of time, we try to do the final details of the design in steps or subsystems: drivetrain first, followed by base frame, upper frame, and “attachments”. Those students on the Design team not modeling are using the pieces to create working drawings for use by either our Build team or our vendors/sponsors to manufacture parts. We like using this method because it gets more students involved early in the season and keeps them busy. It also keeps a steady flow of parts coming in so we’re (hopefully) not building everything in the end.
Glad to hear this worked out so well for you, and good luck this season!
First Cab Library, under the Extrusion section, has 80/20 parts that you can download. After downloading the correct file for SolidWorks (STEP), you can change the length to whatever your desire is. I have used this in the past, and it works well for me. I hope it does the same for you :yikes: .
When I open the step file for the 80/20, for some reason I am unable to change the length. Solidworks interprets the file as having fixed dimensions and it seems that no matter what I do I cannot change the part itself.
JesseK, make a new sketch on the front face, and extrude this face to whatever length you desire. This will make one long piece of 80/20. PM me if you need any more assistance, and I will be happy to help you .
Are you using the 80/20 part files from the FIRST CAD library? Those models, particularly, seem to have been created by tracing the 80/20 profile from a catalog or something; none of the edges are orthogonal and it makes mating things together nearly impossible.
Yep, our old team pants have been converted into the material for our bumpers! They look really cool up close because you can see all of the seams where they were pieced together.
Shelley (aka - Team Mom Extraordinaire) is the seamstress and she is being secretly creative with using other parts of the pants. She keeps talking about a surprise for our pit setup, and all we know is that the flap pockets are missing from all the pants.
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! Are those bumpers in the videos the ones made from you old team pants? Ours are going to pleather…