Part #7: Hardware Hacks | SUMMER ROBOTICS: Tips and Tricks for Your Team

Hopefully by this point you've got a good idea about getting the administrative part of your team up and running fairly smoothly. Now, we've come to the fun part: building the robot. Like we explained in Part #2 of the SUMMER ROBOTICS series, our team is divided into 3 sub-teams that help to break down the tasks to build the robot and be competition ready. Over the next three weeks, we're going to provide the tips that each of our sub-teams think are essential to know before you start work on the robot. This week is all about hardware (the literal nuts and bolts of the robot. Here are the tips our hardware sub-team wants every rookie team to remember.

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Tip #1: Righty tighty, lefty loosey

Yes, yes, yes, you probably already know this, but when it's not habit or part of your daily routine, it's easy to forget, and it can cost you money. Especially if you don't work with screws or bolts on a daily basis, it's hard for you to automatically know which way to loosen the tightest bolt because it won't budge either way. When you turn the wrong way, you strip the screw/nut and the screwdriver/nutdriver making both useless over time. We've gone through a ton of little allen wrenches too because we've stripped them trying to loosen shaft collars. (That leads to another tip: make sure you are using the correct size allen wrench/screwdriver/nutdriver to loosen your screw/bolt to prevent stripping too.) Stripping your tools and parts for your robot may not seem like a big deal. You just need to buy another one, and they're not that expensive. That's true, but every little penny counts when you're a rookie team. Spending money in places when you could have avoided spending money is a great way to financial sink your team fast! But this tip isn't just about saving money; it's a good idea to get in this habit even past your rookie year. It's a practice of taking care of your property and being thrifty with what you already own.

Tip #2: Research before you build

Starting to see a theme yet? You need to research everything! What other teams did and posted in their blog or on social media is a great resource to draw your inspiration from. Of course, don't copy other team's designs, but you are free to take whatever inspiration and ideas you get from your research and apply them to your robot. Researching will also give you an idea about how well your system will work. A lot of the time, when you start building without researching, the robot won't work, and you'll have to go back in and make tweaks and edits until you get it right. This could take hours, days, or months, so save yourself some time and research what works and what doesn't.

Tip #3: Draw sketches

Sketches and drawings are useful in three regards: designing, explaining, and documenting. In terms of designing, drawing it out can help your team to place measurements and other little technicalities down before you start building. It can serve as a loose blueprint of what you're going to build. Sketching also helps to explain what you're thinking of, especially during brainstorming with your team. You can show how the different parts of your idea would move and where it might be located on the robot. Whenever your team does make a drawing or sketch, take a picture. Documenting these things is good for the engineering notebook and for keeping your team organized. With a picture you can constantly refer back to your design and idea while you're building, so you're less likely to mess up.

Tip #4: Map it out in a CAD

This is super similar to making a sketch, just digital, and it serves almost the exact same function. Sometimes, though CAD is much easier to understand than a hand-drawn sketch and provides more detail because it's a 3D model instead of a 2D sketch. Our team used CAD to design our robot more than we used sketches and drawings, but it's really up to your team to figure out which will work best for you. Try them both out and choose the easiest one. As a side note, don't forget to take screen shots of your CAD design as you go along for documentation, since there isn't a piece of to stick in your engineering notebook like with a normal sketch.

Tip #5: Test it at every stage of building

That's right, even when you're not quite done. When you test your robot, you start to get a clearer idea about how the final product will work, and you'll almost definitely want to make tweaks to your design after you test it. And yes, even making sure the wheel turns the right direction before you attach it to your robot is important. It's much easier to fix something before it's bolted down to the rest of your robot and in a hard place to reach.

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Be on the lookout for our next blog post with more tips and tricks next week about using software to program your robot to be competition ready. We hope you enjoy this SUMMER ROBOTICS series and put some of these tips to good use with your FTC team.