Resources & References
Resources and References
The FRC community publishes a lot of genuinely excellent free content. These are the resources that actually get used by competitive teams, organized by what you're trying to do.
Learn Design and CAD
frcdesign.org is the best single resource for learning FRC mechanical design and Onshape CAD. Built by students and alumni from top teams, it covers the full pipeline from learning the software to designing complete robots.
The four most useful sections:
Learning Course: structured curriculum that takes you from zero Onshape experience to designing full mechanisms. Work through this in the off-season.
Design Handbook: reference wiki on materials, structure, fasteners, power transmission, and mechanism design. Not a course, more of an encyclopedia you dip into.
Mechanism Examples: hand-picked, annotated examples of real mechanisms from top teams with CAD links and breakdown notes. This is where "steal from the best" becomes practical.
Best Practices: Onshape-specific workflow guides covering document setup, layout sketches, part studios, and assemblies. Read before starting any robot CAD.
cad.onshape.com/learn is Onshape's official self-paced course platform. The CAD for Robotics curriculum is specifically built for FRC and FTC teams. If you've never used Onshape before, start here before going to FRCDesign.org.
Covers: sketching, part modeling, assemblies, collaboration features, and branching/versioning. Takes a few hours to get through the basics and gives you a working foundation before you touch robot CAD.
citruscircuits.org/resources hosts Team 1678's training slides and strategic design presentations, freely shared with the community. The Strategic Design presentations by Mike Corsetto are some of the most widely referenced material in FRC for understanding how top teams decide what to build and why.
Worth reading even if you're not a strategic lead. Understanding why the decisions get made the way they do changes how you approach design.
Calculators
These are the tools you use at your desk while designing, not during competition.
ReCalc
Web-based calculator for motor selection, gear ratios, flywheel sizing, linear mechanism speed, intake velocity, and more. Sharable URLs make it easy to hand off a calculation to a reviewer.
reca.lc
JVN Calculator
Excel/Google Sheets spreadsheet by John V-Neun (FRC 148). The original FRC mechanism design calculator. Good for drivetrain design and quick ratio sanity checks.
Search "JVN Calculator FRC" on Chief Delphi
WCP Belt Calculator
Calculates belt center-to-center distances for HTD 5mm belts. Simpler than running the Origin Cube featurescript when you just want a quick number during ideation.
docs.wcproducts.com/belt-calculator
ReCalc is the current standard for mechanism calculations on competitive teams. If you're sizing a motor for an arm, elevator, or drivetrain, start there.
Robot Examples and Inspiration
The Open Alliance (theopenalliance.org) is the most valuable learning resource in FRC after your first season. Open Alliance teams post real-time build threads on Chief Delphi throughout the season including CAD, code, strategy decisions, and lessons learned. You can follow a team week by week and see exactly how they approached design problems, what broke, and how they fixed it.
Start by finding a team that built a mechanism you want to understand, then read their whole build thread. It's faster than any tutorial.
Behind the Bumpers is a YouTube series by the FUN Robotics Network where teams walk through their robots in detail at competitions. Videos cover mechanism design choices, how things were built, and what changed week over week. Search "Behind the Bumpers FRC" on YouTube. Watch robots that did things well, not just robots that won.
The Blue Alliance (thebluealliance.com) is where you find match videos, competition results, and team histories. If you want to see how a specific robot performed across a season or find footage of a mechanism in action, this is where you go.
Vendor Documentation
The vendor docs are more useful than they look. They contain wiring diagrams, CAD downloads, software setup guides, and product-specific design notes.
docs.wcproducts.com
Full WCP product documentation including swerve module assembly guides, Kraken wiring diagrams, belt/chain system overviews, and CAD file downloads
v6.docs.ctr-electronics.com
Phoenix 6 documentation for Kraken, CANcoder, and Pigeon 2. Setup, configuration, and API reference. If something CTRE-related isn't working, the answer is almost always here.
docs.revrobotics.com
MAXPlanetary assembly guides, PDH wiring, through bore encoder setup, and SPARK MAX/Flex configuration
Community
Chief Delphi (chiefdelphi.com) is the main FRC forum and has been for 20+ years. Every experienced FRC member is on there. If you have a design question that isn't answered in this GitBook or in FRCDesign.org, search Chief Delphi first. The answer almost certainly already exists in a thread somewhere.
FRCDesign.org Discord is where the FRCDesign.org community lives. You can post CAD for review, ask design questions, and get feedback from experienced designers. More responsive than Chief Delphi for quick questions.
A note on using these resources well
The most common mistake with external resources is passive consumption. Reading about design and watching robot reveals is useful but it's not the same as designing. The goal is to use these resources to answer specific questions you already have, not to absorb everything and then start building.
A more useful habit: when you're working on a mechanism and hit a decision point you're unsure about, find two or three real robots that solved the same problem and study how they approached it. Then make a decision and document your reasoning. That cycle of question, research, decide, build is what actually develops design judgment.
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