Happy new year, everyone!
Here are the seven robot design training/reference documents I’ve written for Team Spyder over the course of the past 7 months:
1: Inventor Best Practices
2: Gearboxes
3: Lightening
4: Linkages
5: Designing for Manufacturability and Drawings
Mini-training 1: Heat-set Inserts and Rivet Nuts
Mini-training 2: Version Control (For CAD)
These documents are both curriculum and reference documents for Team Spyder’s design students, meaning that they’re used to train the students and that the students can consult them when making their designs.
I created these documents for a few reasons:
- There is a lot of FRC design content that’s very FRC-specific (e.g. Intake mechanism design, Shooter mechanism design, etc.) And there’s a lot of very good mechanical engineering content that’s very hard to approach as an FRC student, especially a younger FRC student (e.g. The Machinery’s handbook.) These documents are meant to teach mechanical engineering to an FRC student, while trying to avoid teaching things that see very little use outside of FRC.
- Most of the good FRC design content is in video form, and plenty of people (myself and some of my design students included) learn best from reading text, rather than from video content or direct instruction. These documents are meant to help people like me.
- It’s been a good way for me to learn more about design through researching the content required to write 160 pages about it.
Some notes about the content of the documents:
- These documents use red links for any outside sources, and blue links for anything that links to another design training/reference document or within the document.
- These documents were made using Autodesk Inventor, since that’s the CAD software that Team Spyder uses. You should be able to use it/learn from it with other CAD software, but it’s tailored to Inventor.
- These documents treat some subjective standards set by Team Spyder’s design team as rules which should always be followed, especially in the “Best Practices” document. While I stand by all of the rules I’ve written, they’re all admittedly arbitrary.
- These documents have information about Team Spyder’s machines and equipment that is only relevant to Team Spyder members.
- There’s some general manufacturing advice, especially in the “Designing for Manufacturability and Drawings” document. This is because all of our designers are also machinists, and Team Spyder doesn’t have a comprehensive set of training documents for machining.
I’d like to thank Micah Duke and Riki Osako, alumni from teams 1622 and 987, respectively, for providing feedback on some of these documents
Now that Build Season’s almost here, and since I’ll be graduating when it’s finished, I won’t be making major additions to these documents anymore. That said, I would like to hear your feedback, and whoever maintains these documents after I’m gone will implement it.
-Marshall