It is the 1103- Currahee Round Up Robot. In case some people did not know; 1103 is owned by Josh Wade and the team is now retired. This CAD is made in Autodesk Inventor. Josh and I have been emailing back and forth for pictures and such, he has a lot of excellent pictures, but some are not close enough up to fully understand where everything goes, so if anyone would like to send me pictures, that would be great! Message me if you want to send me pictures.
The steps I am building this go as follows:
Drive Chassis - COMPLETE
Lift - _________
Claw - _________
Sensors, other stuff - _________
As you can see I have a lot to do yet, but please send me pictures if you have any! Help would be appreciated!
but how did you constrain the inventor pieces? What I ended up having to do is place a construction line into each hole, and then use those lines to constrain the piecesā¦and I was just wondering if thereās a better way.
The way I Constraint pieces is if you click constraint (hot key C), the first (default) constraint that will show up is the mate constraint. It is used to āābondāā things together. It is like the constraint that is like glueing something together. It will place things together. In order to do this you have to click on the 2 faces that you want to āāglueāā together. The other āāmaināā constraint is also the default when you click Constraint. It is the other rectangle in the constraint box, and it is called Flush. It is like lining things up. You click on 2 edges that you line up and Flush it up. Do you have a Skype? If not you should make one! I could screen show you how to work with inventor. I did it with Andrew Remmers, and that is how I learned. It works great. Message me once, or if you already do have one!
Iād say that thats pretty close there Just Iād use something besides āglueā to describe it
But basically what I use is the a variation of constraints mostly one of the mate constraints like Dakota described, or Tangent constraints. These I use on round objects such as screws and bearing blocks, I found my magic number to make things work (.009) this makes things nice and center
No mean to rain on your parade, but the whole point of CAD is to help you design your robot. If your just re-creating Curraheeās robot in cad you just wasting your time. you might as well take a photo of his robot and post it. Spending endless hours on trying to CAD a robot that was already built by another teamā¦ not so worth your time. Just a good tip, spend the time that you were going to spend cading the rest of this robot, on CADing your 2011 gateway robot. Anyway i know syntax error is a pretty win team, and im waiting to see what you guys come up with for this game, (who knows it could be something just as amazing as currahee last year :eek: ). Hope you take into consideration my words of advice.
PS: i think pretty much everyone knows who currahee is, heās pretty much a celebrity in the vex world.
and ive designed my robot for gateway, and will return to it once i finish 1103ās. I find cadding fun, and designing robots, but i wanted to copy something instead. and i hope i do as well as currahee did, if not syntax error.
Thatās cool, i was just making the assumption that you had not started your gateway cad. And if you like cading go ahead, its also pretty good practice, but i suppose you dont need much considering its your hobby ;).
Sure, CAD was invented as a design tool. Itās especially useful when what is being designed has to be reproducible and precise or is expensive to manufacture. When you want to model an engine blade to be manufactured hundreds of times over and put in dozens of A380s, you need CAD.
When you are building one of something, when building is so easy that you can build almost as fast as you can CAD and when many of the best designs involve abusing the parts in ways that work in the real world but not in a computer, CAD finds itself somewhat less useful.
CAD designed robots can be very compact and elegant, but they can also be quite impractical. If time spent CADing is time which could be spent iterating, refining, testing and practicing then there is no reason why abandoning CAD for design should disadvantage a team. A lot of VEX teams CAD. Many of them, to their credit, even CAD before they build. But the main reason they should, and I suspect the main reason they do, is that it is a good way to practice a useful skill.
In my opinion, though, there is one other best reason to CAD: Itās the only way, short of keeping it assembled, to completely and permanently document a robot. CAD models say unambiguously what a robot was in a way photos donāt. If a picture tells a thousand words, a CAD model tells a thousand pictures. And if ever a robot deserved its little electronic million-word memorial, this one does.
So good luck and I hope you manage to get everything finished correctly. I look forward to seeing the result :).
Itās looking amazing! I agree, CAD is great for documenting robots and I certainly think that 1103 deserves to be documented. Good luck on this ā itās already looking really, really good!
Thanks jordan, i also must say it is turning out really nice! I thought i would give up after the chassis because it would be too complicated, but i will get this robot CADded!!
Thank you for the post. It is so true haha. And i also agree that this robot deserves a memorial cad!
Use sub-assemblies to keep everything manageable, work on the drive train, lift etc. as separate assemblies and bring everything together in one final model.
Thanks for the tip! I have been doing that and it has bEen working well. A problem i have now is that it is starting to lag(lift assembly)ā¦any suggestions besides turn off visibility on some parts?
Although I agree that documenting a robot is a great use of CAD i would also argue that CADāing a robot before building it is an exceptional way to ābuildā the robot and make sure it works without having to do the building. This reduces the amount of wasted materials.
There are techniques involving the use of representations but I have not used them much.
I documented our teams roundup robot also after worlds as we had not done any CAD during the build process. I think itās a worthwhile exercise and a good way to learn to use the software. I found the final assembly was very slow to update, but them Iām also working on a Mac using parallels and Iām sure that has a significant effect. I used 7 different sub assemblies and then tied them altogether in a top level assembly. Hereās a link to a few screenshots of out final model.
just thought id give a little bit of an update here. Well josh sent me some info on things to change so i am currently fixing everything that i need to work on (spacing, metal), i should have the whole ladder assembly done by tonight!
Left Drive
Right Drive
Claw - which had two sub assemblies, left claw and right claw.
Flappy arm left - didnāt know what else to call it
Flappy arm right
Tower
Then the final assembly had the left to right structural connections.
ok i finished uploading the final ladder attachment picture! finally finished!!! i am now going to start working on the claw, or a few modifications i still have to make on chassis.
Just Iād use something besides āglueā to describe it 
you might as well take a photo of his robot and post it. Spending endless hours on trying to CAD a robot that was already built by another teamā¦ not so worth your time. Just a good tip, spend the time that you were going to spend cading the rest of this robot, on CADing your 2011 gateway robot. 