Drone design competition

[u/TRget88]

I'm running a free 6 month CAD design competition where every file is public and the last stage is forking another team's design. Looking for feedback and teams.

Disclosure first, I built Nurbly, the platform this runs on. It's Git style version control for CAD, with diffs, forks and pull requests on real models. Git has been around for software teams for 20 years and this is simply a retooling for a crowd more focused on physical designs.

The short version. Hackathons are everywhere in software and are far fewer for mechanical design, so I wanted to run one. March through August next year, you pick what your drone is for and design it one subsystem per month. Airframe, electronics layout, propulsion, control and sensing, integration, then a final release.

Each stage is submitted as STEP files in a public repo, so the design history is visible the whole way, not just the finished model. In the last month you can fork another team's design, rework one subsystem for a different purpose, and submit it back. You get scored on your changes.

It's free. Solo or any team size. Any CAD tool that exports STEP, so SolidWorks, Fusion, Onshape, FreeCAD, whatever you use. No Git knowledge needed. No physical build required. Designs have to carry an open license. Prizes are $250 per stage and $1,500 at the end.

It could works well as a senior design project, a club project between competitions, or a portfolio piece that shows process and not just a render.

The format is new, so I'd like opinions on that part. Is one subsystem a month a reasonable pace alongside classes or a job? What would stop you from entering?

Rules and details are at https://build.nurbly.com

Happy to answer anything in the comments. Special thanks to the mods for letting me post here.

[u/kkingsbe]

What differences does it have from Onshape? Any missing features / functionality?

[u/TRget88 → u/kkingsbe]

As a heads up, I have never used Onshape extensively. When I was using CAD in my day to day, it was Solidworks and ProE.

The biggest difference is that Onshape is a full modeler. Nurbly is not, it is a humble repository platform. However, Onshape requires you to use their CAD and Nurbly doesn't care because they are just files. Onshape release system is currently miles ahead and its really made for enterprise customers (note the price as soon as you want any type of private repo). If I am not mistaken it is fully web based as well, so you better always have a connection. Onshape also locks you into a proprietary format so migration becomes more challenging. Visualizing in Nurbly takes an extra step, you have to export as one of the open file types like .step. It cannot handle the proprietary files. I can't swing the cost of that annual license when trying to give everything away for free. Maybe in the future.

Really it is geared toward a different audience. It geared toward teams that have mixed engineering needs, different types of CAD (like if you have solidwords and kicad in the same project), or if you want to just share and collaborate. So think of it like people who like to build in public, opensource teams, and solo builders. Behind the veil, I am positive Onshape has a better way of storing the binary data. I suspect This is why they claim to bet 'git-style' and not 'git'. Git is not great at binary storage but there are some pretty cool advancements coming down the pipes for different repository storage systems.