Setting Up Onshape and Navigating Documents

Get the free FRC account#

FRC and FTC teams get Onshape free through the Onshape for FIRST Robotics program. A mentor or design lead typically obtains the free Educator plan and invites students into a team workspace. Sign up with the education account, not a personal free plan, so you get the full collaboration features. The FRCDesign.org account setup guide walks through this step by step.

Documents, tabs, and the cloud#

In Onshape, everything lives inside a Document. A Document is like a project folder and can hold multiple tabs along the bottom:

• Part Studio tabs — where you model parts.
• Assembly tabs — where you put parts together with mates.
• Drawing tabs — where you create dimensioned drawings.
• Imported files, images, and more.

Because Onshape is cloud-based, your work saves automatically and continuously. There is no 'Save' button and no risk of losing work to a crash. The full edit history is recorded, so you can scrub back in time to any previous state.

Collaboration features that matter#

• Real-time co-editing: Multiple students can work in the same Document simultaneously, like Google Docs for CAD.
• Follow Mode: Click a teammate's avatar to ride along with their view — great for teaching and reviews.
• Comments: Attach notes to specific parts or features.
• Branching and merging: Create a branch to try a risky change without disturbing the main design, then merge it back if it works. This is borrowed from software version control and is powerful for design reviews.

Navigating in 3D#

Learn these basics first; they are the same idea in every CAD tool:

• Rotate: right-click-drag (or two-finger drag on a trackpad).
• Pan: Ctrl/Cmd + right-drag.
• Zoom: scroll wheel.
• View cube / named views: snap to front, top, isometric.

The Feature list and the rollback bar#

On the left of a Part Studio is the Feature list — the ordered recipe of everything you have done (sketches, extrudes, holes). You can drag the rollback bar to step backward through the recipe to edit earlier features. Understanding that a part is a sequence of features, not a static blob, is the single most important mental model in parametric CAD.

Practice#

Spend 20 minutes just creating a Document, adding a Part Studio and an Assembly tab, and orbiting around. Get comfortable before you try to model anything. Then work through the Onshape Fundamentals exercises in Stage 1A of the FRCDesign.org course, which is built specifically for this.