Georgia FIRST Robotics Robot in 5 Minutes CAD Tutorial from AutomationDirect

in this video we'll recreate this robot from the game animation as a twenty to one scale model in about five minutes using a cad program called onshape you can use any cab program you want it'll look nearly identical to what we do here we're going to use onshape because it's completely cloud-based you don't install any software on your pc to use it which means you don't need a high-end pc to do cad and you can access your design from any pc or mac anywhere all you need is a browser before we jump into the cad let's walk through what we need to do we'll need a robot chassis that's 32 by 21 inches and we'll divide that by 20 later to make this a scale model we then want to take this sketch of a rectangle and extrude it up four inches to create the robot's base we'll then sketch the top rectangle 16 inches above the floor at 16 by 14 inches and extrude the base up to that we'll then punch a hole in here for the balls and we'll add some cylinders that go all the way through the robot to create some wheels well now we just do the exact same thing but this time in cad i'll go to oneshape.com and log in again there's no software to install you'll need to create an account of course but don't worry it doesn't cost anything click on sign up choose the educational account and fill in the blanks i already have an account so i'll just sign in i usually work in metric but we want inches for this demo so i'll go to my account and change my preferences to inches and pounds and save the changes now any document i open will be in inches and pounds i'll click on onshape to get back you can see where i've already created this robot once but we want to start fresh so we just create a document and give it a name notice that this will be a public document that's because i'm using the free version of one shape which means you can actually pull up this exact project to view it now we just repeat what we did a minute ago we want to sketch the base of the robot and that's easiest to do if i'm looking down on top of the robot so i click on the plane i want to sketch on and hit sketch this says i'm drawing or sketching on the top plane in cad you always draw on a plane think of it as sketching on a sheet of paper i want to draw a rectangle i'll use the one that starts at the center and draw the base of my robot the dimensions already selected so i'll just type 32 inches divided by 20 to get my scale model how cool is that it does the math for me i don't have to figure out the correct scaling now the other dimensions highlighted so i'll just type 21 inches divided by 20. now we want to extrude that base which is all the faces on our first sketch blindly up 4 inches click the green check mark and if i hold the right mouse button down and move it around we see our robot base next we want to sketch the top of our robot but you can only sketch on planes and there is no plane up here so what do we do easy just create a plane we know we want the top of our robot to be 16 inches above the floor so i right click on the top plane and just say give me an offset plane and we see it appears on the screen and we want it to be 16 inches divided by 20 above the floor i'll click away and we now have a plane that's 16 inches above the floor we can also click this arrow to flip sides if we want to you can create a plane from an existing plane like we just did or relative to a point or a plane or a line or a set of three points or even a curved line lots of ways to create planes to draw on let's label this plane top robot and hit the green check mark to draw on that plane we can right-click here and select new sketch or just right click on the plan itself and select new sketch or left click on the plane and hit sketch there's lots of ways to begin a sketch we want to look straight down on the robot and draw a rectangle that's 16 inches divided by 20 and 14 inches divided by 20. i'll hit escape to turn off the rectangle tool and grab the center point and move it someplace in here let's grab the dimensioning tool and click on this line and shift-click on this one and tell it we want the top to start five inches from the rear of the robot i'll hit escape to exit the dimensioning tool and use the right mouse button to rotate the model to extrude the base up to the top we need to exit the sketch and select the top of the base and hold down the shift key and select the top and click on loft that extrudes one surface to another there's lots of cool things you can do with this loft but we already see our robot so we're good to go i'll use my right mouse button to rotate the model let's punch a square hole in the front to collect balls we want to sketch on this right plane now so i'll click on this to square things up this time i'll right click on the plane and choose new sketch grab the rectangle tool draw the hole we want and we want that to be 8 inches wide divided by 20 and decide to be 9 inches tall divided by 20. i'll hit escape to exit the rectangle tool and let's move the hole down here if i select this line and hold the shift key and select this line i can click on this to tell one shape to make these lines coincident that's a quick way to get them to line up and to stay lined up no matter what we do now we want to extrude that sketch but we want to remove material through all the other direction and look at that we now have our hole let's also extend that backwards a bit by choosing second end position and we want to go back maybe 8 inches divided by 20 of course now if i hold the right mouse button and rotate this we see the hole goes past the right plane that looks good so hit the green check mark to finish let's change the name of that extrude to ball hole so it's easier to find later we should label all of these but i'm not going to take the time to add wheels we want to sketch on the front plane and let's square that up i'll grab the circle tool and draw my first wheel how about 6 inches divided by 20. i'll right click and copy and right click and paste to get my second 6 inch wheel escape to exit the circle tool and move this guy here and this guy here let's click on this guy and hold the shift key to add this line to our selection and tell them we want them to be tangent then click on this guy hold the shift key click on this guy and make them tangent that puts the wheels right at the bottom of the robot let's get our dimensioning tool and select the center of the wheel and the back of the robot and set the wheel to be five inches from the back of the robot and i'll do the same thing for the front wheel let's change the name of that sketch to wheels and hit the green check mark i'll select our wheel sketch and hit extrude we know our chassis is 21 inches wide or 10 and a half inches from the center so let's make the wheel stick out an inch past that and make the cylinders 11.5 inches divided by 20. to get the other side we just add a second end position that's the same 11.5 inches great we see our wheels so let's call that extrusion wheels and finish it great we have our robot but there's a problem we don't want that cylinder messing up our ball hole right so should we have waited to do the ball hole until after the wheels no watch this we can simply move the ball hole to after the wheels and look at that a nice clean ball hole well that's it and guess what it only took us about five minutes to do it and we don't have to save our work everything you do is automatically saved let's do one more thing let's add a retractable hanging hook like this this is just a bent paper clip that i can pull up so i can hang the robot all we need to do is punch a hole through the robot so i'll select the top of the robot as the plane i want to draw on right-click new sketch and i'll scroll in using the mouse wheel we want a hole so i'll grab the circle tool and draw a circle on top of the robot i know that needs to be about 0.07 inches in diameter to fit the paperclip i'll hit escape to turn off the circle hit extrude we want a solid remove material through all okay uh oh looks like the hole's in our ball chamber so i'll right click on the sketch to edit it let's use our dimension tool select the circle and the back of the top of the robot and make that distance 2 inches hit ok great now the hole isn't in our ball chamber now we need a slot cut into the bottom of the robot so i'll hold the right mouse button down and flip the robot over and click here to square things up and scroll to zoom in i'll select the base of the robot as the plane i want to sketch on and hit sketch to draw a slot let's draw a line where we want the slot to be i'll escape out of the line tool and select the line and hit this button which tells the program this is just a temporary line we're going to use to construct something else given that we just select the slot tool and select that construction line and give it a diameter that's a little bigger than the paper clip extrude remove material up to about 14 inches divided by 20. that'll stop the slot 2 inches before a 16 inch robot top now we have a slot and a hole for our paper clip i'll rotate that around a bit so you can see it great it looks like a robot again in one shape you never have to save anything so we're done down here we right-click export i'll give it a file name and make sure stl is selected our units are in inches and we want to download the file we see the stl file was created and downloaded from our cloud-based project to our downloads folder if we open that folder and double-click on the file windows automatically shows us the part we created in 3d and it even looks like it's about the right size we just hand this stl file to our 3d printer slicer software and print it out i did that and got this guy now i'm going to take my paper clip put a tab here and slide it into my robot i want to hook about here and we're done we now have a scale model robot with an extendable hook that we can hang on the 3d printed field switch again you can do this in any cad program you want they're all pretty much the same i put links to how to get all of them for free below this video we used one shape for this demo because we can use it on any pc we don't need a fancy workstation and we can work on it anywhere because everything is stored on the cloud we don't need to carry the files around with us which is perfect for our virtual design contest you can work on this anywhere on any pc please know that we barely scratch the surface of what you can do with cad programs like onshape and then i glossed over a lot of things to keep this video short there are tons of tutorials on youtube and orange shape even has its own learning center so be sure to check those out when you get stuck or just want to try something new and remember if you need help contact us at the virtual grits webpage at georgiafirst.org we'll connect you with an experienced team that will help you out we also created written step-by-step instructions for a robot similar to the one we did here and this one there's a link to those instructions below the video have fun with your robot skill model we can't wait to see what you come up with automation direct and georgia first working together to help you build a brighter future