1A: Onshape Fundamentals
Introduction
Welcome to Stage 1! Here, you'll engage in a series of Onshape exercises and projects designed to introduce and develop your CAD skills within an FRC context.
In Stage 1A, there are 3 major sections: sketching and part design, multi-part part studios, and assemblies. Each section has a link to a learning course to learn the skills of each topic, then an exercise to help immediately apply those skills in an FRC context.
Tip
Remember to take a look at the website feature guide to gain an understanding of the different features used throughout the learning course!
Learning Courses
Onshape's Learning Center provides free learning courses and articles covering everything from document navigation and sketching to advanced surface and sheet metal modeling. It's a valuable resource for both novice and seasoned users alike. We use a few selected courses to assist learning the fundamentals of doing CAD in Onshape, but the rest of the curriculum is project based.
The structure of the courses includes some short videos and practice models, expected time is 2-4 hours.
Warning
The Onshape learning courses are important as they will teach you the interface and form a basic foundation for CAD skills. Unless you have a significant amount of prior experience using Onshape, you should not skip the learning courses as the exercises assume that you have an understanding of CAD basics.
Split Screen
The learning courses and exercises work better if you can see both the instructions and the Onshape document at the same time. Tabbing back and forth can lose a significant amount of time when going through the course.
The recommended way of going through the course is using two screens, but if this isn't possible, split screen is an option that works. The toolbars in Onshape will be shrunk, but learning keyboard shortcuts can minimize the time loss this might cause.
