Wanted to take a minute and share a Creo example with everyone. In this case, my FTC team chose to design its intake system in Creo.
Stepping back a moment, this is a team of 8th grade and Freshman that have not previously had any CAD experience. Their exposure to CAD has been the gracious offer of the PTC suite to FIRST FTC teams. They have taken the online Creo courses which are helpful but really flourished with Creo after an in person day long training by PTC on the west side of Chicago last year. Thanks again for a GREAT event! The course showed the team that they could overcome some of their hesitance to design on paper by bringing their ideas to life in Creo. As the team is uncomfortable creating engineering drawings at this time, they find Creo as a rapid idea development environment where the ideas in their head translate into the CAD environment. And so that is what they did . . .
The steps they took are as follows:
- Design and animate sprocket / gear assembly for intake to visually assess and share with team. Looks good . . .
- Design and animate intake flapper assembly to visually assess and share with team. Everything looks to be coming together so far . . .
- The team is on board with this design and have a great feel for it that they could not get from a drawing. Time to build a prototype from available materials . . . Proof that the best laid plans are not always perfect this gear assembly does not seem to be suitable for the application. The gear strength does not meet the real world design needs. No problem, modify the CAD renderings to sprockets and update the prototype.
- With everything seemingly in hand, its time to build the actual intake and test it in the Res-Q environment . . . Success!
Feel like you are having difficulty describing your ideas? Not yet ready to develop hand drawn engineering drawings to show your ideas to others? Why not utilize PTC Creo to move your ideas through the developmental pipeline. We did it and so can you!!!
Thanks PTC for making these tools available to FIRST FTC and for providing us with a 2015-2016 PTC Grant to help make this season possible. We hope we are representing you well.
Steve
Coach
Dynamic Signals (7351)
