FTC-Engineering Book



Tips for a Winning Engineering Book

We gave this presentation at the South Florida League Kickoff and scrimmage, feel free to check it out!

We keep a digital copy of our engineering book on google drive:

Every team member has access to these crucial documents and can see and edit them at any time. We did this to ensure every team member contributes to the book, and has access to any information they may need if they missed a meeting or are writing a section about a design they need more details about. Although we keep our engineering book online, we do print it before each competition and add in the physical copy of any calculations or drawings we have from that day.

We use a separate google slides document for each section:

Doing this allows us to print each section with ease once it is completed and find pages easier that if it was one large document. Google slides also proves to be an easier tool than google docs to use when adding pictures or screenshots to a page. It also allows us to format the header, footer, and background pictures easily from year to year.

We organize our engineering book into several sections:


 Section A-Our Team
This is where we introduce our team including a team summary page, our constitution, history, and team biographies.

 Section B-Business Plan
This is where we introduce our team business plan including our executive summary, team organization, finances, budget, sustainability plan, and design process.

 Section C-Community Service
This section details several community service events we have held. Depending on the year, this section may include all of our events or just be a brief overview of events in addition to another binder dedicated solely to community service

 Section D-Daily Reports
In this section, we detail all our daily meetings including a task list and reflections responding to each of the tasks. The reflections are our way of explaining what happened at the meeting, how we completed a task, why we completed it, and any issues we had in the process. This section makes up most of our book and includes drawings, calculations, CAD and screenshots of code in progress. We use these books to teach new members how to complete certain tasks and to avoid making the same mistakes from year to year.

 Section E-Engineering Design/Build
In this section we detail the design of our robot. Our goal is to be able to build our robot completely from scratch using mainly this section of our book. This is where we add complete CAD drawings of our robot as well as any important calculations we have made. Next year we plan to add parts lists for each system on our robot to provide even more details.

 Section F-Code Development
This is our coding bible. It includes segments of code that we think are crucial to our robot. It also includes controller diagrams, schematics, and driver instructions so anyone reading it knows how our robot functions.

 Section G-Strategy/Testing Stages
Competition success doesn't only come by building and designing a robot, but by planning and developing well thought out strategies as well. This section of our book summarizes our strategy for each competition including models representing the projected path our robot takes during autonomous. We also add in the success rate after each competition to see how we are doing with our goals.

Click the links below to view our engineering books from the past years

 Our Complete 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 Engineering books are coming soon

 2018-2019 Book - South Florida League Think Award

 2019 - 2020 - South Florida League 3rd Place Inspire Award, Florida State Championship 2nd Place Inspire Award

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