The official Onshape training series for VEX robotics teams. Five levels from first login to full robot assembly — use this alongside the Spartan Design CAD guides.
🎜5 levels · Onshape Education · Free with your DUSD account
▶ Onshape for VEX Robotics
Playlist · 5 videos · Official Onshape Education
🎜 Level 1–5📚 Beginner → Intermediate
CAD for VEX Using Onshape
Official Onshape Education · Full Playlist
Click to stream all 5 levels in sequence · Covers account setup through full robot assembly▶ Open on YouTube ↗
▶ Browse by Level
1
Level 1 · Beginner
Setting Up Your Onshape Account
Create your free education account, navigate the home screen, and access your first document. Get your environment ready before the first build session.
Fastened, revolute, and slider mates. How to constrain shaft-to-bearing, wheel-to-shaft, and any VEX component relationship. The most common sticking point.
How to use this alongside the Spartan guides: Watch the video for each level, then open the linked Spartan guide to apply what you learned with Spartan-specific naming conventions, folder structure, and team workflows. The videos cover the tool; the guides cover how we use it.
Onshape CAD Pathway
These guides build on each other in order. Complete the video series alongside them.
Onshape’s cloud-native architecture applies the engineering principle of design reuse — the same concept behind component libraries in software engineering and standard parts catalogs in mechanical engineering. The VEX V5 Parts Library contains every legal competition part with exact dimensions, weights, and material properties. Rather than measuring and recreating each part from scratch, engineers access a shared specification database and instantiate pre-validated components. This is identical to how aerospace and automotive engineers use supplier CAD libraries — no one models a standard bolt from scratch. The assembly environment then enforces kinematic constraints (mates) that model real mechanical joints: revolute for shafts, fastened for fixed connections, slider for linear motion. Each mate removes specific degrees of freedom, just as physical joints do.
🎤 Interview line: “We use Onshape’s parametric CAD with the official VEX V5 parts library. Every mechanism we model has the correct weights and gear ratios, so we can calculate our center of mass and torque requirements before cutting a single piece of metal. We treated CAD as an engineering tool — not just documentation for the notebook.”
You want to model a 1:5 gear reduction in Onshape. What is the correct order of operations?
⬛ Draw both gears from scratch in Part Studio using measured dimensions
⬛ Insert the 12-tooth and 60-tooth gears from the VEX V5 Parts Library into an Assembly, then apply a revolute mate to each gear’s center shaft axis to constrain their rotation
⬛ Import a STEP file of the gear set from the VEX website and extrude it into a Part Studio
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Notebook entry tip:Build & Program — Orange slide (Appendix) — Document when your team completed each video level as a skill development entry. Include date, level completed, and one thing you applied immediately in your own Onshape document. A training log that shows skill progression is evidence of deliberate team development.