Whos Mr.P?

well james, what you watched was nothing like how the real world CAD's things up. Plus solid works is a better program to use in my opinion. ( fingers crossed, we will have a copy in hand assuming all the paperwork goes through.) If you want a lesson on how to use it well I can schedule a Demo for the class to see all the way things can be done by an engineer. you have seen our CAD drawings from last year. they were very simple and to the point. i think you could learn it quick and be the best at our school. just need to get you trained. That is the job of the advisor. I am working on that.

I left to who is this its me to 5 pages of post
It saturday night, wow you are all nerds haha

1 Our first bot was built with a drill press, reciprocating saw, power drill and a lathe from 1972. We did mill 1/4" grooves into with a wood cnc router (WD40 as coolant of course) and sanded the frame rails to length with a disc sander in the wood shop.

Banebot motors/esc, axi 2826/4120 jeti speed controller and your alot further then alot of teams.....

Mr. P wrote:

well james, what you watched was nothing like how the real world CAD's things up. Plus solid works is a better program to use in my opinion. ( fingers crossed, we will have a copy in hand assuming all the paperwork goes through.) If you want a lesson on how to use it well I can schedule a Demo for the class to see all the way things can be done by an engineer. you have seen our CAD drawings from last year. they were very simple and to the point. i think you could learn it quick and be the best at our school. just need to get you trained. That is the job of the advisor. I am working on that.

We've used SW for our 3rd year now, and I have NO IDEA what james meant about the measurements! If you want to make a cylinder that's 0.5 in dia, you select a plane and sketch a circle, then give it a 0.5 inch dimension, then if you want it 3 inches long, you extrude the sketch 3 inches. Simple as that.

The only 'drawback' (if you can call it one) is that there is so much capability in this program you can get overwhelmed and forget where a particular tool is or how to use it. But with just a little basic knowledge you can make amazing parts and assemblies. Also, practice helps a lot.

The greatest ting I can say about CAD is that there area mass of parts and pieces out there on the Net right now.

If that stuff was there in the past, things would have gone a lot smoother.

Basically all you have to do in the modern days is design a frame and weapon material.

The rest of the parts and line ups are already done for you.

I do wish castle would get some parts up on their site though.

I basically just use boxes and cylinders for their parts.

I am not in any way an expert at CAd or CNC, this year will be a lot of learning from my part on how to do both.

I go old school and draw the bots up on graph paper at full scale then make sure all of the parts fit.

The kids dive straight into CAD and get the drawings done in Inventor.

We print them out when they are done and match the part print outs to my graph paper and see if everything is right.

Sometimes I am wrong and sometimes they are wrong.

I does pay to do both I have learned.

The CNC thing is a whole new addition this year.

I have done CNC in the past but we are using a small F1 car machine to do the work and it will be a test to have them come out right.

On wood prototypes yes but going to metal on those machines is a definate maybe.

Keep learning CAD, it really is 50 percent of manufacturing, the other 50 percent is knowing how to machine and how to select materials.

FRISCO

I agree with Bob...that Solidworks is possibly THE best design tool.

There are a lot of tutorials on how to use it. Knowing the weight of all components as you design is a big plus.

I know that there are a bunch of options to turn a sw file into a machinable part, we use Mastercam exclusively to generate G code for CNC machining.