Our team is looking for ways to get new members hooked while developing stronger CAD skills and revamping our design process.
We’re looking to do a mock CAD build season, where we as a team go through an animation video, brainstorm, prototype, and try to roughly design and integrate a whole robot in CAD in a Saturday. Goal is to get the newer members some CAD skills so they can step up and keep the work student done. In addition, we want to set down a firm project management deadline schedule that our sub team leaders are aware of. Wondering what you the general take is on the idea?
Wondering what your teams are doing for preseason training and getting ready? Work on drive train? Soldering, CAD, smaller full course engineering projects etc …
At 4464, our mechanical team is finishing up the butterfly drive design we’ve been working on all offseason (we should be building our first module soon, and then it’ll be on to a full drive base), our controls team is learning java by re-programming last year’s robot, and our PR/outreach teams are working on fundraising and Chairman’s.
For the whole semester, mentors have been giving weekly half-hour presentations on various robotics topics.
Additionally, the CAD and mechanically-inclined are working on designing and building a swerve module, as practice for designing and building stuff (and potential use in 2015). The programmers are participating in the NI offseason competition.
On our last meeting before build season, we’re going to hold a mock kickoff and practice strategizing for a new game.
Designed and built a demo bot from cad
2.Taught CAD so everyone robot related at least knows how to navigate and make changes.
3.Designed some drive trains in CAD
4.Got most of our sitting bots working
5.Building a vex pro drive in a day
6.New programmer implemented 254’s Cheesy Drive
7.Tests on rules and strategic design.
8.Machining refresher
Running BunnyBots. It’s an offseason event that we host that involves a whole other build season (our mentors and graduating seniors come up with a new game each summer). We and local teams have the fall to build BunnyBots while training new members, and it’s a ton of fun. See the link in my signature for more info.
Last year build season was the first year my team started to use CAD drawing to design a robot. Although we never use that robot, I gained a lot of experience in interpreting another person design by them sketching or saying what they want on the robot. It work great because we could improve the design and add on to it as we progressed through the build season.
I would suggest to break into groups and each group design a robot base on the rules of the previous games. Then later discuss what would or wouldn’t work on a design.
I will be uploading some of my rough sketches that I drew for this year’s game. I mostly work on the chasis that will become a 30 point-climbing robot. Later on that season, I created a final drawing for this robot. This pretty much shows you how I started to draw a robot, and the changes that we made through that stressful 6 weeks.
