Skip to main content

CAD & Prototyping

Many teams dive immediately into CAD after initial brainstorming. My teams do not, and there are many reasons why:

  • The CAD phase is extremely committal. It takes a lot of time and work to create a detailed CAD model, so it should not be used for rapid designing.
  • While CAD may be great for some teammates, it removes most of the team who do not have CAD skills from the prototyping phase and they will not feel as though they have provided a tangible impact to the robot.
  • CAD designs are difficult to visualize in real life without 3d printing or machining.

Cardboarding​

In stead of moving immediately into CAD, move into "cardboarding", a process of creating a rough design of a system out of cardboard. It should not have motors or anything attached to it, just enough to get the ideas across. Do overly not stress about the size of each component, figure out the logic and how it will work before you start to worry about fitting within constraints.

Cardboarding will give you an idea of how many moving parts are necessary, how they will be used, and how the final product will behave.

Build most (if not all) of your systems out of cardboard and hot glue.

Once you have your cardboarding finished, you are ready to move into the CAD or construction phase.

CAD​

Especially as a beginner team, CAD may not be the most responsible move for your team. It takes a great deal of time and if you intend to use a build system like REV, Andymark, or GoBilda, you will see very little actual benefit from using CAD, and it will be much more effective to just dive in, design some of the bot on paper, then start building.

If you are not using a build system and most of your robot will be custom, you will have to use CAD. You will find that it not only makes digital fabrication easier, but it will make it easier to design more components in the future.

I suggest using OnShape to create your CAD models. It is a simple-to-use cloud-based CAD platform that is free and easy to learn. It has an incredible amount of features, but does not have a steep learning curve, making it extremely accessable to beginners. Additionally, OnShape has a huge FTC community which makes it even easier to build great models. There is a huge shared library of almost all of the components that are available to you in FTC. (Email first@ptc.com with the email your OnShape account is under for access)

Check out the CAD section for a getting started guide in OnShape.