They’re a heck of lot better than throwing something up on the White Board (Chalk Board).
I know that they’re not as Accurate as they could be, but for your first attempt, very good… Better than I could do… 
The Flexx Air G2?
“Better than I could do…” Was wayyy to much praise. Modeling like that involves Constrain, snap part, rotate, instert part, ctrl+Z a billion times and a few hours. It’s much easier then you think it is. Once you get the hang of it, it’s as simple as sketchup. And to flange, wow much faster to find then I thought. You must have seen it before. Now off topic for a min, but what are you guys doing for the programming demo on sat? And here’s your cookie http://i727.photobucket.com/albums/ww279/I_am_Unr3al/Cookie.jpg although in a real cookie there’s more chocolate then dough 
Thanks for the cookie. It tastes great (or it probably would if I ate it)
For the programming at the boot camp, I am making a detailed book on line following (I only started this morning!), and hopefully will have a robot going with the example code from the book demonstrating different methods and using different amounts and patterns of line followers. I will be available all day to answer questions on line following and programming in general (RobotC only).
If I have time I will try to make a slideshow or movie thing to show, but you won’t get me making a speech or presentation:)
Not so sure about the cookie, I got it from some health website. But for the demo, you HAVE to do a speech. Get a projector, make a slideshow and talk about it, “now, if you please turn to page 4. You can see the different kinds of sensors used in line tracking.” Going even further into the mouth of Off Topic, apparently you got a NASA scholarship. Care to share any details? And don’t forget to get rangi to rec. it and stream on sunday. But you probably wont do the presentation 
. But the book should be nice. Back on topic, has anyone used sketchup to design vex models? I’ve tried it but seems much harder to snap parts together. I think i’ll just stick to Inventor. Although hopefully on saturday there’s a practical on Solidworks when SMC does their demo.
Aparently I got offered a job at NASA , but the NASA scout talked to someone else and I didn’t hear of it until I got back to NZ. The story is found at http://www.robotics.org.nz/index.php/component/content/article/35-free-range-robotics-in-the-news.html under the title “TV ONE - Kiwi kids shine in world robotic competition”
By the way, the cad design looks good. I wanted to make a few ilistrations for the book using inventer, but as I am homeschooled I don’t have a school email. I contacted autodesk, but it’s supposed to take three business days.
Yea, it does have instruction if you don’t have a student email. So even if you are homeschool you can register as not having a school email. It took about two days to get a login to download Inventor. Out of interest, what were you going to model using CAD?
I was just going to make a few ilistrations of different patterns of line sensors mounted on a metal bar. I can assemble the line followers and take a photo of it for now though, and then hopefully I can get inventer and model the line followers before I release the book on our website.
@ vex.unreal
Is designing everything in CAD really help that much? To be honest, our robot final designs were on Solidworks, but there is too much error to take into account, that you end up changing the whole CAD drawing. I say that unless you are able and know how to simulate the physics behind each MAting between metal parts, that its not worth it.
Sorry, not bashing you or anyone, just intersted to know if it has helped you.
BTW your first attempts are very good, and in my opinion putting in screw and nuts are too time consuming haha took me hours getting screws in
Designing anything on CAD for me is more about just getting a realistic view of what a concept will look like. You can picture an idea in your head, and you know everything on how it will work and look. But sharing that idea, when drawing is not enough and for some people it’s hard to accurately share your idea, and to get the detail that you can get in CAD would take three or four times as long to replicate if you were drawing, although for a rough sketch would be much less but you lose detail. And if you want to show the design from multiple angles, you would spend days drawing. It’s an easy way to share an idea you have. Well, not that easy but you get the idea. CADing for for me is, like I said before about helping share ideas with the team, and most of them come from me (last year, first conveyer bot. which was one of the first ones of the New Zealand comps was designed by me and a teacher who had the same idea. Although we didn’t CAD it.) Then for ideas for the clean sweep season, we have pages and pages of ideas. And for some of the more complicated one, knowing how to effectively use CAD will help alot in sharing those ideas. And CAD is a great way of sharing ideas to those who are not the best at robotics, and when you’re talking about an idea they have no idea what you’re talking about. You say parallel arm to a newbie, ??? What’s that? You insert a few parts on CAD with a few notes and bingo, instant tutorial.
And about CADing your robot. It was a four wheel drive with motor powered clamp? Although it was simple, fast and quite effective, why did you CAD it? Other then for additional help with building it?
Great to see you guys are getting revved up for the RAR bootcamp. We hope to have a few cool CAD surprises for you. Do you remember the Nombot promo video http://www.youtube.com/user/RoboticsAtRangitoto#play/all/uploads-all/0/ID8mXnGxKyQ well you may have noticed the CAD drawing of Leviathan. Leviathan was fully drawn up in Solidworks before we built him! The scissor lift was able to move and lots of the nuts and bolts were there too. In the video you see part of the model with heaps hidden to make the image more readable in the video.
We CAD our robots giving subassemblies to different people bringing the subassemblies together as we go along. We have almost finished the holonomic drivetrain CAD for Scoopy doo so that may be available for you guys to play with.
We have created a directory structure that anyone doing CAD keeps to so subassemblies, assemblies etc all still work when moved from laptop to laptop.
Say hi to a RAR roboteer this weekend! 
Glad to see you guys getting revved up about the boot camp. We have been working hard to try to make sure everything goes according to plan! The AV plan fills a full A3 sheet!
SMC will be bring two of their Pneumatics training tables to the event so people can design and try out pneumatic circuits. It is our belief that pneumatics will play a winning role in clean sweep (but we won’t put money on it! 
We will have 6 PCs setup with solidworks installed so our CAD team can get people going with modeling robots. If you remember our video about Nombot and leviathan http://www.youtube.com/user/RoboticsAtRangitoto#play/all/uploads-all/0/ID8mXnGxKyQ you may recall seeing Leviathan modelled in Solidworks. Well he was, fully, he even had most of his nuts and bolts! We get people to model different subassemblies that are then build into assemblies and finally assembled into the final robot. We had to hide alot of Leviathans detail to make the video look right 
Scoopy doo has a holonomic drive train and each of his 4 omni-wheel/motors is a repeat of the same assembly. We may be able to show the model to you this weekend.
We will also have 3 PCs set up with RobotC so new teams can get help with programming.
A local company will be displaying battery chargers (ones that show graphs of batter condition etc)
Not to forget the Home School showing us how they worked out Line Following.
Heaps more…
We have attached a PDF of what we hope will happen when but gremlins are sure to invade on the day. :mad: So keep your fingers crossed!
The weekend should be a blast. As we say at RAR…party, compete, repeat! Well actually ‘design, build, test, panic, repeat’ to quote a FIRST team’s motto. Not quite but you get the idea that we love this VEX thing!
Rangitoto Boot Camp_8 Aug 09.pdf (219 KB)