Design Technician: Basic Curriculum

This is the start of our Design Technician program, check here for the full description. While the courses are in a semblance of preferred order from their respective source, bouncing between sources may provide a break and keep things fresh along the way. Obviously skip topics or jump ahead if you are beyond a particular course.

Part of the purpose of this curriculum is to develop a portfolio of projects that can be used to help demonstrate skill and understanding. As you move forward and upload and share your projects, be mindful of usernames across platforms. Pick a name that is unique and available across them, perhaps check it is available at all the locations you may want to share before committing to a name. We will be using Github and/or Hackaday.io for our projects, but it may be wise to get the same name on Youtube, Bluesky, X, Printables, and other platforms for future use. Think of this as the start of your personal branding and skills showcase, you may be sharing this with collaborators, schools, future employers, or even investors.

Alison Topics – 40 hours
– AI For Beginners
– Series Parallel Circuits and Ohm’s Law
– Geometry Basics: Circles, Coordinate Geometry, Locus and Transformations
– Introduction to Trigonometry for Engineering
– Introduction to Electronic Sensors
– Electrical Measuring Instrumentation
– Mechanical Measurement Systems for Simple Measurements
– Mechanical Measurement Systems for Advanced Measurements
– Maintenance and Troubleshooting for Electronic and Electrical Devices
– How To Use A 3D Printer

Other Topics – 2 hours
– GitHub Basics Made Easy
– Hackaday.io Quick Start Guide
– Raspberry Pi Zero 2w Setup Tutorial
– Adafruit Raspi Zero Headless Setup Tutorial
– Adafruit Simple Raspberry Pi Robot
– Pimoroni Inventor Hat Mini

Autodesk Topics – 12 hours
– Learn Fusion for CAD in 90 minutes
– Sketching
– Part Modeling
– Assembly Modeling
– Drawing
– Animation
– Rendering

Project Capstone – 20 hours
– Design and print/construct/assemble a robot or drone chassis capable of controlled movement (does not need to be graceful, any controlled movement is good). 
– Document the project (hardware and software) using Hackaday.io and/or GitHub. A blend of platforms is acceptable, for example: discussion, specs, hardware, links, photos, etc via Hackaday.io, with links to GitHub where you will store the software development if any is done. Either or both is fine, whatever suits your ability to clearly share your project.

You might be thinking “I didn’t learn anything about robots or drones yet” and that is true, but you have got the basics of design and some understanding of electronics and motors, so go from the gut, this is design by trial and error while we continue to learn. Adapt to your skill level, perhaps you are more advanced in 3d Printing so you want to design your whole chassis from scratch, but need a ready made motor and controller situation, or vice versa. AI like Perplexity can be incredibly useful for sourcing common specifications, recommended parts based off your vehicle design, battery sizing, and more.

For our basic example project (link coming soon), we are making a simple tracked robot with a camera that will be controlled by a simple web app. We are using a pre-made chassis, pi hats made for our project scope, and designing and 3d printing all the enclosures and mounts for the boards, camera, and other bits that need to attach to the chassis.

Main Components (No affiliate links, this is exactly what we ordered for ourselves.)

The benefit of these parts is they will allow for many styles of drones or robots, and there is still plenty of room for expansion. We plan on adapting this setup for a fixed wing drone in the intermediate and advanced projects by adding additional boards like the Adafruit Server Bonnet for additional servo channels or the Waveshare SIM7600G-H 4G HAT (B) for GPS and Cellular functionality.

For additional support and assistance be sure to checkout the Perplexity Tutor Link and the ataary Design Tech subreddit.

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