Hello every one,
I just wanted to know how other teams setup their engineering journal and what you write about.
The way I’m writing my notebook is in a few stages. I have my main “journal” which includes notes and pictures from every single workshop we’ve had and all changes to the robot. It serves the purpose of in the final copy, showing the process from beginning to end of how the robot was built in all it’s versions.
Because of the way I build with multiple prototypes, I’m also going to have another small booklet which I write about the final version of each robot version. So it’ll only have about 2-5 robots in it and will have lots of detail.
My last booklet I plan to have a small booklet regarding the final robot which I’ll show judges first.
We also will have a small booklet for programming and skills etc.
A good tip is to document EVERYTHING related to your robot’s design. We started our notebook before the Skyrise reveal in April, and kept a collection of useful knowledge for robot construction, CAD tips, programming tips, etc. We structure our notebook so that no detail is left out. All of our CAD work is being documented, with plenty of pictures of the robot model. Be sure to include plenty of hand drawings and sketches, with dates on them. Document your entire building process as well, again including plenty of pictures. When you finish programming, be sure to include all of your programming information in your notebook, and explain what every snippet of code does. It’s also important to plan out your field strategy and practice plenty of times, including your trial runs in your notebook. Practice for field play, robot skills, programming skills, etc. A Bill of Materials and budgeting information is always nice to have too.
IMO the notebook should be just as useful to the team who put it together, as it is to the judges reading it. The ultimate goal of the design notebook is to portray your design process as accurately as possible to the judges. Allow them to understand why you made each design choice that you did, why you chose to change things around from what you previously had, what worked, what did not work, etc. The notebook should NEVER be an afterthought for teams, which I’ve seen happen way too often.
I’d say just make the notebook with the objective of making it as useful as possible for yourself, not with judging in mind, like that you’ll be sure of having a good and helpfil notebook. I mean the whole point of the notebook is helping you in the design process right ?
Oh my God i just found out that i have the exact same engineering notebook format as K force… so exciting!
Yes, we have a full journal divided into time based sections. We have separate robot structure, program and strategy booklet. These booklets are updated prior to each tournament. So judges can find exactly what they are looking for regarding a robot quickly while knowing that this team has done its job doing daily based journals.
For me, the hardest part is documenting the design process… especially when you are trying to start something brand new in computer. So many small details just flash by in the head and many decisions are quickly made, and it takes a lot of description to document why you built things exactly this way.
I love documenting brainstorm and research. Turns out commenting others’ stuff is indeed mich easier! 
Haha I don’t know if having the same format as me is a good thing or not but I’m glad I’m not the only one 
Are you writing yours on computer? I’m actually writing mine by hand and although you can’t format it as well as a computer journal but its easier to set up and write. (I believe it also looks like more work has been put into it). I say I’m doing the journal by hand but I’m writing up the robot structure and programming on the laptop.
One thing to consider:
I believe that the design notebook is not simply a journal. A journal is limited in scope–you simply record what you did each meeting, and why you did what you did. However, this creates a very detailed (and, unfortunately, oft-times boring) record, spanning many pages. This means that important design decisions can be lost in the crowd of minutia.
To counter this, my team treated the design notebook as a presentation as well as a journal. We made a tabbed binder, with sections for “robot overview” (highlighting important robot features), “strategy” (complete with top-down gameplans/field maps), “autonomous code” (diagrams of routines, pictorial representation of controller button mappings, a written document highlighting industry guidelines to which we adhered, and finally the code), “design” (including CAD models, sketches, more detailed design decisions/processes, etc.), and finally a “journal” section.
The idea is to make the engineering notebook also marketing tool, rather than only a technical document. Judges can be tired and easily bored, so some “fluffy” summaries can be nice for those judges. However, we would also include the full, traditional “journal” part, in case we had a judge who really wanted to get into the nitty-gritty details of our decisions.
(This is my perspective, and my experience, so please take it with a grain of salt.)
As far as track record with this idea: While we have not won any championship-level Design Awards (we only attempted it once at Worlds–we didn’t know we had to pre-register the first time we went), we have won multiple of these trophies at the regional level. The most notable tournament at which we used this approach: we won the Design Award at the 2012 (goodness–I feel like I’m getting old) VEX Mid-Atlantic Championship.
//Andrew
Yes, we are doing this on google drive. It is just easier to crop a screenshot and instantly paste it in the document when doing detailed design process. Also google docs allows multiple viewers to edit at the same time, which makes writing a notebook more fun and time saving.
I am glad to see more excellent teams adopting the similar effective presentation plus journal format. I agree that the engineering notebook should also present the project rather than simply documenting it.
I am not going to add much, but what I will say is when you’re talking to the judges, point out where every thing is in you journal. If you say something like, “We came up with this intake design in July because…” Point out where that is in your notebook, because most judges like the visual aspect to go with it. The judges at worlds seemed to like it, so it’s worth a try.
Our team (well, to be honest, just me…) is going a little over the top this year and im well aware that there are much easier ways to do this but, my team insists on using google docs to enter pictures of the bot, entries of what happens each day, and paint drawings or cad drawings of ideas.
Because of this, since i know judges often prefer a binded, unchanged book, i have to first record everything in the gdoc, then re-write it all in the engineering book vex gives us. The entries are sometimes 5-10 pages on huge meetings so it is VERY time consuming to write twice. making room to print pictures off the computer and glue in can be painful too…
anyway, its coming along nicely and hopefully we will get the design award at our first competition. We will be adding results from competitions and stuff as well. unlike some teams, weve chosen to go for a date-arranged book not a “type” arranged book. by this i mean, if we are building a chassis and an arm at once, and the next day we attend a community outreach event where we taught new teams about vex, you would find them one after another, even if the next day we get back to building the arm.
some teams would have a section for arm construction,section for community outreach, etc.
we just arrange by date and use stickies and a table of contents to help judges find what they are looking for.
Past discussions and videos about the engineering notebook
https://vexforum.com/t/engineering-notebook-best-practices/26358/1&highlight=engineering+notebook
https://vexforum.com/t/4252a-documentation-reveal-2012-2013/23955/1&highlight=engineering+notebook
https://vexforum.com/t/engineering-notebook/24776/1&highlight=engineering+notebook
https://vexforum.com/t/engineering-notebook-and-robot-switching/24807/1&highlight=engineering+notebook
[Engineering Notebooks by Super Sonic Sparks - YouTube
**Probably the biggest thing that’s overlooked in almost every engineering notebook is the programming section. **](Engineering Notebooks by Super Sonic Sparks - YouTube)
One way to think about it is: what would a completely new grout of people need to recreate your results? From my experience in a human powered sub competition, design notebook and presentation is similar to vex. Since there was no documentation for that portion of the sub, I had to completely reverse-engineer and re-source all parts to simply fix a part of the sub.
This thought process is also important if someone cannot attend a team meeting and they did some portion of the robot that someone else needs to fix/recreate/improve.
And, a printout of an uncommented program does not count. Even a printout of a commented program is not ideal.
What would you put in the programming section my team just described what our autonomus did.
a complete technical readout of our code, inside and out. An explanation of what everything does so the judges can understand it.
As RobotDesigners implied, you’ll want to analyze and assess why you did a task in addition to preserving your journey. As in, how the code started out, how did it develop, why did it develop as such, evaluate the results, etc. etc. etc… Treat it with the same care as your mechanics
https://vexforum.com/t/4252a-documentation-reveal-2012-2013/23955/1&highlight=engineering+notebook
This link has been posted above, but it is a great example of how to do a thorough engineering notebook. This one is 4252A’s (Pastoral Invasion). This notebook sets a good standard of what you want your notebook to aspire to be. They won the design award at all of their local competitions that year
Can anyone else not see the file from the Dropbox link?
Same here.
yeah, it 404ed for me too