CAD & Design
Design robots in Onshape, SolidWorks & Fusion.
The CAD & Design department turns a team's game strategy and prototypes into a complete, manufacturable 3D model of the robot before a single part is cut. Designers use parametric CAD software (overwhelmingly Onshape in FRC, with SolidWorks, Fusion 360, and Inventor as alternatives) to model every tube, plate, gearbox, and mechanism, pulling in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts from libraries like MKCad and vendor catalogs. The team produces assemblies, drawings, and a bill of materials (BOM), then runs design reviews to catch problems while they are still cheap to fix. Strong CAD work is what lets an FRC team build a robust robot quickly during the short build season.
Curriculum
Before you open any CAD software, you need to think in three dimensions and read the language engineers use to describe parts. This primer builds the spatial-reasoning and engineering-drawing fundamentals every FRC designer needs: coordinate systems and views, orthographic projection, and how dimensions, tolerances, and units turn a sketch into a part the machine shop can actually make.