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Stage 4: Next Steps

Welcome to stage 4, practically the last stage! In this stage, you'll focus on mastering design fundamentals to the point where they are natural. This means learning how to optimize your CAD to be more parametric, mastering best practices and workflow that makes your CAD faster and more easily collaborated on, and learning more about engineering design and strategic design. There aren't any specific steps or projects in this stage; it's a lot more open-ended, and can be seen more as a "choose your own adventure".

  1. Work on your own projects and get feedback. This could be mechanisms you don't have practice with, robots for specific games, or just anything you're interested in. Practice your workflow, optimize your CAD to be more parametric, and learn new ways of doing things. Make sure to get design reviews and feedback from team members, mentors, or in the discord server. As you get better, your improvements will be more in speed gains, parametric CAD, and optimizing load times.

    Tip

    The "design-review" forum channel can be posted in to look for feedback with a more determined structure. Feel free to ask for more specific feedback.

  2. Examine and learn from examples of robots. Often the most important tool for learning is to look at examples of other robots. "Steal from the best, invent the rest." Most things you'll ever need to design in a typical season have already been done in some form or another, and you can take easy inspiration from other teams while trying to improve it for your application. Open Alliance on ChiefDelphi is a great resource on the design and build process for many teams, and has a lot of public CAD.

  3. Learn more engineering design. Refer to the Design Handbook pages and the deep dives in the mechanism examples pages. This includes how to assess potential forces on parts of the robot, pick the right materials, design rigid structures, learn more about what parts are available to FRC teams and how to use them effectively, and at a top level, what goes into designing good mechanisms.

  4. Learn strategic design. This means learning how to set priorities and requirements for your robot. This means basing your design off of your game analysis, those priorities, and your team's capabilities. This means learning how to design simply but effectively. This means learning how to structure a build season schedule and tradeoffs based off of your priorities. There are many resources for this, including Karthik's Effective FIRST Strategies presentation, Team 1678's training material, and Team 2910's Pop-Up Presentations. Combine this with good engineering design knowledge and CAD skills and most any team can design and build an effective robot and do very well in competitions.