How important is having CAD in the engineering notebook, over the summer I am having 1 week to meet with new team members and I would like to make somewhat of a robot in 3 days. I don’t want to do a CAD because I want to wait for the rest of the teams advice.
Some of the priorities are to record, communicate and develop, and whatever does that well is good.
You can put together lots of different ideas in CAD as rough sketches/layouts before you commit to anything. You don’t have to obey the laws of physics in CAD, so you can put stuff where it will go before you’ve solved all the design problems. Here’s an example from a while ago. You’ll see that some of the blocking out is done with blocks, not detailed parts.
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It isn’t necessary as my team used to use the v5 parts library under the notebooks section for our designs. But it is more useful the older and more experience you get.
The better question is “How important is it to have engineering drawings in the notebook?” CAD is just one means of generating engineering drawings. Plenty of teams have hand drawn (using rules of course) of their robots. The purpose of these is to communicate how to recreate your robot design. It is a great skill to have.
You will note that the Notebook Rubric does not specifically ask for CAD.
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Yes thank you for clarifying, I always use diagrams as well as Cad