What are the advantages of using CAD to recreate your robot???
In two years across IQ (full volume) and now V5RC (high stakes) we never used CAD or any platforms to see what our robot will look like before we build it and we have also never talked about it??
How will this benifit for the judging for notebooks and for the season.
Can anyone tell me any ideas about this topic.
You can probably do just fine building tinkerbots for competition without the benefit of CAD, if you have enough time for fine tuning.
But part of vex is about learning real-world engineering skills, and the judges will consider your CAD efforts during their deliberations. My company fabricates wastewater cleaning equipment, and doesn’t build anything without CAD. Example here: Dankest Vex Memes? - #5222 by kmmohn
CAD lets you plan and work out designs while not actually needing to build the actual robot. It also gives you an idea of what parts are needed so that you can order them beforehand.
CAD has several benefits.
It allows you to design the robot before building it, so you can work out the kinks in your design before assembling it.
It allows you to determine exactly which parts you will need before you begin building so you know what size c-channels you need and if you need to order more of some parts.
CAD shows a design and intent which when put in the notebook shows that you thought about your design before you built the robot.
As you do more custom things (such as with polycarbonate) you can design your part in CAD and make sure it attached to the rest of the robot the way you want it to and that you will have enough clearance so that it won’t hit other parts of your robot.
Having CAD allows you to easily share your ideas with others so they can design mechanisms that work well with your mechanisms. Additionally, some members enjoy designing but don’t want to build and vice versa, this allows someone who doesn’t have enough experience designing stuff to build something someone else has designed.
Additionally, teams can look at CAD from other teams robots or from previous seasons in order to remember how to do old techniques (like if you want to reuse s mechanism from a previous season in your design)
Since the field/elements are available in CAD as well you can visualize how the parts will interact with the field or other parts even if your team does not physically have those parts or a field.
More specifically to the notebook rubric, it is a much better tool for showing how you came to your design and how a judge would be able to replicate the process than a simple sketch. Some more complex sketches also work and you can use a combination of the two in order to have a well rounded notebook.
You don’t need to disassemble and sort the parts of a CAD model to move on, and you don’t have to obey the laws of physics during the build. Once you’re familiar with the physical components so you have some feel for how they go together, and with the CAD package, CAD is a lot freer and quicker than spanner land.
Here’s an ancient model showing reasoning about centre of gravity and searching for good pivot points and space:
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