Overview
Welcome to the learning course, the heart of FTCDesign as of now. Through a set of 4 stages, this resource teaches you all you need to know to dive into designing for FTC and building efficient workflows that scale up to work in a team effectively.
The course is structured in a way that even if you don’t know everything there is to designing yet, you are still able to contribute to the team’s CAD. Design leads will more closely know their team members’ capabilities are based on which stage they are on, and can provide tasks that those members can still accomplish.
Stage 1
The very first stage of the learning course establishes important concepts like why someone should design with CAD. It then aims to give the user the base knowledge and tools (such as featurescripts, libraries, etc.) to be relatively comfortable with using Onshape, all while remaining relevant to FTC.
It is recommended that even semi-experienced designers with Onshape complete or at the minimum read through this section as FTCDesign looks to build efficient, parametric workflows that are built upon in future stages. The use of new tools within Onshape are key to improving design speed and effectiveness in both a solo and team design setting.
Stage 2
This stage teaches the user how to CAD parts and assemblies around a layout/master sketch, eventually ending with full subsystems! The stage covers everything someone would need to know about common parts to power transmissions before CADing the mechanism, but does not go into the fine details and pros/cons on how to achieve results in a plethora of ways.
It is structured this way so that team members who don’t know all the aspects of designing in FTC can still contribute based off a common master sketch. It also builds the necessary experience in CADing many major mechanisms before entering stage 3.
Stage 3
In this stage, users will learn how to design their own mechanisms and robots with master sketches, learning the decisions behind prior layout sketches in previous activities and the details behind designing a robot that is easy to iterate on and improve. The stage will end with a full robot design, simulating the process of deciding on a robot archetype after a game kickoff.
Late stage 2 and all of stage 3 will be a lot more open-ended than previous sections to allow the user to be creative. While FTCDesign has the goal of having detailed and comprehensive information, we hope to move people away from the notion that there is only one “meta” robot design, and rather encourage learning how to explore more options to improve past what the learning course covers.
Stage 4
The final stage of the learning course is entirely based around how to improve your designs from the previous stages on your own. This section is meant to provide insight on how to decide which optimizations to attempt for a competitive advantage. While there will be some guided examples of common enhancements in designing for FTC, the end goal of this stage is to leave the user with all the tools to make their own, new changes to designing FTC!