Software and guides
Everything the team builds with, and where to learn it. All of it is free for students, though a few of them want a Mines account or a machine on the campus network.
How to Robot Book
A guide book written by members of the team: an introduction to robotics through a series of lab exercises. It is meant for engineering students starting out who want to learn the art and the tools behind mobile robotics, and it assumes nothing beyond that.
It is the best thing to read first if you are new. Everything else on this page is a program the book will eventually ask you to install.
The programs
Roughly in the order a new member meets them: version control first, then whichever of the CAD and code tools their part of the robot needs.
Git
A distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code. The team uses it for every project, so it is the one program on this page that everybody ends up needing.
ROS
An open-source meta-operating system for robots. It provides a great deal of what a robotics project needs anyway — message passing, drivers, mapping, navigation — so the team's autonomous vehicles are built on it.
OpenCV
A library of programming functions aimed mainly at real-time computer vision. If a robot has to work out what it is looking at, this is usually what is doing it.
Fusion 360
A capable CAD program that is free for personal and student use, which makes it the easiest one to get started in. The team ran a workshop on it and the whole thing is below, guide and video.
- Guide document
- Accompanying CAD files
- Part 1 — Intro and basic navigation (~13 min)
- Part 2 — Objects and construction geometry (~5 min)
- Part 3 — Sketching (~17 min)
- Part 4 — 3D features (~19 min)
- Part 5 — Assembling components (~27 min)
SOLIDWORKS
One of the leading CAD programs, and the one most of the team's mechanical work is done in. The school licenses it, so the install comes from Mines rather than from the vendor.
Installing: download all three files from SharePoint into one folder, run the .exe, then run SWinstall.bat once it has finished extracting. The older route was the F: drive, at F:\install\Solidworks\Auto SolidWorks Install\SOLIDWORKS 2019 SP3.0\.
Eagle
A PCB design program the team has a long-running love-hate relationship with. It is free and it mostly works, which has so far been enough.
VS Code
A very good code editor, not to be confused with Visual Studio. It runs on Windows and Linux, which is why the team settled on it.
Mathcad
For working through calculations visually. The equations look like equations, it tracks units for you, and it does the arithmetic — which makes a design calculation something you can hand to somebody else and have them follow.
Installing: the student version is on the school's F: drive at F:\install\MathCad — pick a version and run the installer. The school also holds a few keys for the full version; ask around and you can usually get one.
Stuck getting something installed?
Half of these want a Mines account, a campus network connection, or a batch file run in the right order. Ask — somebody has almost certainly hit the same wall.