Getting Started with Altair Inspire for FRC
Altair EmployeeFirst of all, welcome to the Altair First Robotics Community Forum and thank you for your interest in Inspire. I am confident that you will find Inspire to be the easiest and most accurate tool to get quick Structural Analyses and Light Weight Optimized designs.
While Inspire is very intuitive and easy to use, everyone can benefit from a little push in the right direction to get things started and you have come to the right place for that.
We are going to start you off on this part:
It's a real world aircraft door hinge bracket. Next time you get on a plane, take a look to your left and you will see a large hinge that connects the door to the plane and hidden behind the plastic paneling will be a couple of parts similar to this holding on to that bracket.
First things first, lets get you the software. Follow this link to get the Student Version of Inspire (we call it the student version, but it has the same power and capabilities as the paid version) When you enter your email, make sure to use an email with a .edu address. That's how we know you are a student. If you don't have access to a .edu email just make sure to put in the notes what FIRST team you are working with so we know to manually approve it. This may take a bit longer than using a .edu email.
https://studentedition.altair.com/
Once you have the software installed, you can download the geometry from here:
You can watch this YouTube video to learn how to do a structural analysis on this part:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAjs_eQM2Ug
Once you have your analysis done, you can watch this video to see how to do a lightweighting optimization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbM_FnMyyTA
After you have successfully run through these exercises, you can take that knowledge and put it towards an analysis and optimization of your own on some of your robot parts.
There are 12 other videos in the series that can help you learn many more cool things you can do with inspire.
If you have ANY questions, be sure to post them here in this forum and we will get you answers right away.
I look forward to working with you to take weight off your robot and helping you win.
Erik W. Larson
Altair
Senior Manager - Global Academic Training