Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

So Hopefully everyone tunes into the mild humor of my title; This isn't meant to be a bashing topic, or a rant or any such thing, simply my personal opinion and concern that I have.

I'm a veteran of FIRST from East Islip Team 311 and West Islip Team 871 (NY), back in 2005, so while I haven't been around since _THE BEGINNING_ I've been around the block. I've been very lucky to be part of teams where the students are the real designers, idea pushers.

We (as mentors) have always attempted to guide our students to the best possible solutions, teaching them the various sciences (and arts!) of engineering. One of the hardest things we have to do is learn to let them make mistakes. Sometimes a mechanism looks like it will work, but then at the last minute wont. An experienced FIRSTer can probably stave off these kinds of mistakes early on, but should we? Don't we know these mistakes because we ourselves have made them? Engineering is not "Do all the right things and make a cool widget" It's about the hundred (or thousand) failed attempts that got you to where you were, that helped you UNDERSTAND why widget X simply can't do thing Y.

So on to my real question:

How does everyone feel about the sudden Proliferation of Purchasable, Prefabricated Parts (P4 for all you DoD acronym lovers like me)?

Look at AndyMark and you can practically build a 100% functional compete-able robot just by buying prefabricated chassis, loaders, lifers, arms, grabbers. It caught my attention today, as I was looking for teflon track slides that my mechanical team has requested, that "loader assembly" and "Rhino Track" have been sold out; High demand for complex parts huh? So I looked further and discovered complete prefabricated assemblies for mech chassis, tank drive chassis, lazy Susans, swerve drive(?!).

Don't get me wrong, Andymark is a wonderful supplier, and they have many useful things, I'm not bashing them. But is this really in the spirit of FIRST? Integration of COTS parts isn't a bad thing, for sure, but when many of the "fun" achievable designs for HS students can be shelf bought, where's the real fun? Sure, ball grabbers, and tank treads, lifty-things arent fancy for us professionals, they ARE intimidating design tasks, not to mention highly rewarding successes that our students can achieve!

I'm sure someone will point out that newbie teams (or simply less sponsor-gifted) teams will argue that "How else can we compete with big powerhouse team X, who has access to 5 7-axis CNC mills of professional company Y" , and I suppose I see their point. My team, West Islip 871, is one of those less-gifted teams. We don't have the sponsorship of a massive machine shop, nor do we have a huge workshop of our own. Our robots are often ugly, and less functional than many others we see, so I understand the (honestly) feeling of despair some teams feel when they see a beautifully engineered and manufactured robot hit the field.

I argue however, that our ugly, maintenance nightmare of a robot, is in many ways more beautiful than some manufactured solidly-engineered masterpieces; Why? Because every part is student drawn, built and assembled. Does that mean we as mentors don't do some strategic nudging? No. Of course we do. But with every robot we build, our students are so proud of their achievement. The glow you see in their eyes when they start explaining to the school board, or a fellow student, how this mechanism they helped design functions, is simply the most wonderful thing I have ever experienced.

How much do we take away from them when we start down the slippery slope of buying FRC specific, competition-made assemblies and bolting them together like erector sets? I for one don't like where that path leads.

So again, this is my humble opinion, I don't mean to bash anyone or anything. How does everyone else at CD feel?

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I honestly think having so many pre-fabbed parts is nice. It doesn't take as much just to have a basic robot be able to play the game. There's still a huge ceiling though, as the best teams will continue to create game specific mechanisms that can insanely outperform any COTS mechanism. I don't think very many teams would be able to get far without having a kit chassis, or without being able to buy COTS gearboxes.

There's certainly an art to engineering, but I find that the students I work with don't want to try and fail, if someone already knows it will fail. They'd rather try something that could potentially work. That may be just our differences in philosophies.

As an outsider, any of these robots will look cool and interesting. As a FIRST competitor and spectator though, I still find it sad that in the day of so many COTS options, teams still cannot field basic machines that can drive and move a game piece. I think some teams may need to reflect on their process, and determine whether buying a COTS intake solution and upgrading it would be more inspirational at competition than designing an intake that fails...

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Before I begin, please everyone do not turn this discussion into a student-built vs engineer-build debate. I feel like this could turn into that VERY quickly.

That said, I have been a member of a team that did not have much support in money, knowledge, or engineers. We built very noncompetitive robots most years and were done quite frequently before lunch on Saturday. It's not as fun as playing in the playoffs. These resources allow teams with less internal data to still be competitive. As a high schooler, I had NO idea how to get power from the motor to the wheel. I was absolutely perplexed. Now as a mentor I know, and these premade gearboxed help the new kids learn how it works. Kids that might not know the difference between a sprocket and a gear (they exist on almost every team).

I am all for it. Chances are the powerhouse teams are building it themselves anyway because they can do it for cheaper. And they have the manpower to do so.

Also, many of the so-called elite teams are also all student designed and built. You'd be quite surprised.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

The prefabricated parts just makes the competition closer. It clumps up the middle of the pack to where one match can bump you up to 5th or drop you down to 30th. It really increases the drama of the competition and, in my opinion, makes things better. Even with the proliferation of off the shelf assemblies, they are rarely optimized and need some significant effort to make them more than just passable.

Because these prefabricated assemblies need to be optimized to fit your specific strategy it allows the effort to be put into making a great robot instead of just one that moves kind of like how you need it to. In my experience, the students have a better experience and have more to be proud of when they can build a great robot instead of one that simply minimally performs the task. We have used the KOP chassis almost every year it has been available, but it is rarely recognizable as such after modifications to make it suit our specific needs. It is wonderful not having to re engineer everything from scratch when there is a basic starting point to work from.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

AndyMark.biz was selling gearboxes in "the old days" of 2005. FRC gave you a full drivetrain and instructions in the kit too! This discussion has been had many times. My team thought about the AM gearboxes in '05, and shelled out for them in '06... and I've been giving Andy & Mark my money every since.

I don't think anyone wants to sell teams prefabbed game solutions (that wouldn't be any fun!). What they do want is to make sure teams have a great FIRST experience... and for low resource teams that can be difficult. These teams need a lot of help. As FIRST has expanded, many teams no longer have access to as many engineers, machinists, hobbyists, and otherwise technically skilled people as they used to. The proliferation of FIRST suppliers like AM, VexPro, and design ideas like Ri3D & FRCdesigns has only improved overall robot goodness and the FIRST experience for students and mentors alike.

And if you want to do it the old school way, you still can! As a student, I really enjoyed the "Advanced Shop Class" aspect of FRC, and I enjoy passing that on too.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Yeah I agree, I didn't want that.

Sure, No issues here. I wan't trying to imply that beautiful robots WERENT student designed.

I actually didn't know Andymark went back that far. Gearboxes might be the straw that breaks the back of my argument.

Let me try to be a bit more specific, maybe I got a little too passionate and didn't use the right words. I didn't mean the mentors sit back and let the students screw up; I more meant for the mentors to teach concepts behind various designs and let the students apply it (and drop key suggestions when necessary).

The biggest reason (for my team particulary) is that for whatever reason, we can't seem to build up and retain that organizational knowledge. We're trying to train up new students as they move through the program, but there seems to be an upper limit to how much information we can cram into their brains before they cycle out of the program. It's entirely possible (maybe probable) that we just aren't doing a good job _teaching_. *shrug*

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Our culture changing mission is served only indirectly by designing and building machines to compete in a game. Building teams (and, through those teams, new generations of informed, creative problem solvers) serves our mission much more directly. I want our students to learn that FRC robot design is less about designing components yourself than it is about learning what works and what doesn't.

If there is an existing solution to your robot component problem, then your custom alternative should only be selected to go on your robot IF it is better. Having designed it yourself doesn't not make it better, but improved function, reliability, cost, or readiness might do that.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I pretty much read OP's post as:

Seriously, COTS parts are awesome! Use them to your advantage. I don't miss the old days.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

As mentors we can help students avoid thousands of mistakes along the way, but you won't prevent them all. There will always be failures, and the lessons we learn from them.

My personal philosophy is to correct every mistake I see when I see it, and talk to the students about the issue (and hopefully create a teachable moment). I want my team to fail at as high a level as possible. Your methods may differ as there is no correct way to mentor. I believe it's impossible for FIRST students to not learn something regardless of how a team operates i.e. mentor built vs. student built.

As for your actual question, I believe prepackaged COTS solutions are a great thing for FIRST. It raises the floor and does nothing to limit the ceiling. Anything that accomplishes those two things is a great thing. I guarantee students on a struggling team will learn more from a functional prepackaged solution than they will from a non-functional "original contraption".

Even if the prepackaged solution isn't used, it may inspire ideas to make an original mechanism work. I can't think of any downsides to prepackaged solutions.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

There are a great many real-world engineering jobs that involve the spec'ing, selection, and integration of COTS components. Not all engineers work on the component design level.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

There's always someone. I did make an attempt to say that what you "interpreted" was actually NOT what I was saying.

Again, COTS Parts are great. I was more opinionated to the more frc-specific stuff, like prebuilt ball grabbers and such.

I don't particulary appreciate the way you attempt to make me seem like a crusty old grumpy man... I'm actually not much older than my students. I also don't want or expect them to design individual gears and sprockets and gearboxes and chains, etc etc. Cut me some slack here. Try to read what I'm actually saying. I don't hate everything, I don't hate COTS, I just see a pattern towards more complete purchaseable solutions.

I wholeheartedly apologize for using words that , I guess, made me sound like I expect students to "figure it out" and "deal with it". That's NOT where I'm going here.

My team is a low resource team. I'm sure the op knows us as we have competed with his team for many years. Until last year our team was hesitant to buy these cots parts either because we simply couldn't afford them or because we thought they would take away from the experience. But after 3 years of fielding a robot that was only a drive train we decided to give some of these parts a try. They have changed our team allowing us to build working robots and finally not have to go to competitions fail a million times and come in last place. Our first working robot since 2012 was our offseason robot which took 2nd in a local offseason. The only cots speciality parts we used was the kit bot which we modified to use Mecanum wheels, competition robot parts roller kit, Rev gussets, and a banebots p80 gearbox.

We still had to manufacture a ton of parts and did stuff we never did before like tapping and getting stuff water jet cut. In fact the robot was 100% student designed and built.

Right now progress looks great. We have a articulating shooter that is 80% finished, a working drive train with pneumatic wheels. And CAD for a lifter. And we were just beginning week 3...

We are shooting a documentary right now on our teams journey obviously it's not all thanks to cots parts but they have definitely played a role. Op we are going to premier the film sometime next fall at our school. You and your team should definitely come.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I do think there is a difference between a generic-use COTS robot part (a gearbox) and a game-specific COTS robot part (an intake). That may be the distinction that upsets some people.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

What's wrong with crusty old grumpy men?!?!?! I'd be out a job without them...

I did say that was how *I* read your post, not how you meant it. Funny thing about meaning (and much like my sarcasm), it's not always conveyed in the way we wish it to be.

I'm all for more pre-made assemblies and more robots in 3 days! Bring it on!

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Different strokes for different folks. It's all about the evolution of the individual team and how far mentors can/want to take them.

Who benefited the most. The team who bought a swerve drive from the vendor? Or the team that engineered or re-engineered the idea?

Yes, cots equal the playing field. I'm fine with that. But it's the journey not the destination. Don't buy all cots at the expense of learning.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

The interesting thing about the intake mechanism AndyMark is selling is that while it seems like a game specific thing, if you look at the last ten or so games for FRC, you could use it as is in probably 7 of them as is, and the other 3 (2007, 2011, 2015) you could modify it a bit for use in, say, a roller claw. So while it may look like something game specific, really a roller intake is just another common component of a robot. That's a big difference in selling that versus, say, a variety of 7, 8, and 10" flywheel ball shooters.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Nicely said. Maybe that's what I was getting at all along?

Yeah, Those kinds of parts I'm all about. We buy COTS parts too, like gearboxes and the like, linear slides etc etc. I think part of the problem is that I'm still new to the whole "leading the organization thing". I'm just a software guy (Blame it on the software right?), so I've got relatively little experience designing physical stuff. But now I've slipped into a leadership role for the team itself and I've got some freedom to actually make choices that can affect where we're going.

I won't lie, that still kind-of scares me. I'm starting to ramble -- and I know it -- Sorry about that. I suppose I wanted to see how other teams approach the problem. I like to hear from people who have lots more experience than I do and try to understand how they think.

Thanks for the discussion so far everyone.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

The product of FIRST is not necessarily the robots. It's the teams behind the robots. FIRST wanted to expand their program almost two decades ago beyond its very narrow scope of industrial partners adopting schools and turned the relationship almost entirely upside down.

There is some sort of spectrum that every aspect of FIRST operates on. While expansion definitely has its own spectrum and I have my own opinions on it, let's talk about a side effect of the current level of expansion.

You may believe that the line has been crossed in terms of the relationship suppliers have with creating specialized products that cater to FRC teams, and you are right to have an opinion on it. One of the great things about FIRST is that I really think it can be all things to all people. The goals one team has may not just be different in sheer scope or difficulty, but may diverge at an even earlier fork in the road. Some teams do not operate under the idea that FIRST trains the next generation of engineers. Some teams recognize it as an opportunity to show kids the potential of STEM fields. Some teams find FRC to be one of the most high profile and effective programs at the high school level that can build teamwork and leadership skills. Others find it a great enabler of community service.

Sure, FIRST has a crafted mission and vision for its program, but teams should also have their own mission and vision for their own program. The meaning of participation in FIRST is whatever the participant defines it to be, which is why it can be all things for all people.

In terms of the spectrum of the relationship suppliers have with FRC teams, they really are not crossing a line for me until they are boxing up MCC kits and selling them as a separate SKU. Even then, the construction of an FRC robot can very well be a tiny fraction of the execution of the entire technical division of the team.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I'll say this. I don't think many teams buy COTS without a good reason. I know that on 68, we finally made the switch to COTS drive transmissions in 2014 after making them custom every year prior. Could we have made custom transmissions again that year? Sure. So why didn't we? Because that was something we knew we could buy a reliable COTS version of, and doing so would allow us to focus our efforts on other custom mechanisms and get parts out of the CAD lab and into the shop faster. That year, in no small part due to the amount of time we saved and the manpower buying COTS freed up for other things, we finally fulfilled our perpetual goal of having almost-identical practice and competition robots. Did it prevent some students on our team from learning about transmission design? I suppose, but it also allowed them to be more involved with learning other things and it improved our build season schedule and performance overall.

I think that was a trade worth making, and I suspect other teams that seem like they should be able to get by without as many COTS parts are evaluating their choices similarly. They aren't shorting their students out of the chance at learning, but rather allowing them to move on from systems that would otherwise consume a large part of their build season and inhibit having a functional or competitive robot. Whatever stage of development or competitiveness a team is at, they can move one rung further up the ladder and help their students learn something new by pushing their competitive ceiling with COTS parts.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I think this is a common feeling on the matter.

I think this is a fantastic discussion to bring up. I do think it is only a matter of time before companies start selling kits to make game specific systems (intake, climber, shooter...) that could be combined to build a complete robot. The past few years have brought companies building complete robots, providing CAD drawings and selling kits of the more challenging to produce parts for these robot systems. The next step is for companies to explicitly sell robot systems along with step by step instructions.

I think it would be fun for the company if they could sell them for a significant profit. :)

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

If there is a market for it, if it is cost effective for the company, and if the prices fall within the rules, let the free market do its thing.

Nobody forces anyone to buy anything.

Do people take issue with companies making a profit?

Heck, if I had the start up money and the man power, I'd be selling my own game specific kits. Business is business.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I agree with everything in your post (I have no problems at all with the current suppliers), except this. If FIRST (either HQ or the teams/community) decided they don't want 'purchasable robots' something could be done.

I do not think companies will ever sell a robot in a box. Not for moral reasons but because cots parts can't be more then $400. A robot in a box is worth more then $400.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Sure, something could be done. But I have a hard time agreeing with any statements that something should be done if such a scenario exists in the future.

FIRST already has price per component rules in place, how much further would you want them to go with such restrictions? How would they be defined/enforced?

If the community doesn't want something, then those people don't need to purchase the hypothetical components. Telling others to not buy something just sounds a bit ludicrous to me.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I'm just going to be jumping all over the place so sorry if you get lost in dyslexic translation.

One lesson that I feel is applicable outside of STEAM (STEAM) and FRC is that in the real world, when you need a wagon you don't need to invent a wheel because it has already been done. Humanity has built upon itself and made advances because it utilizes what we have learned.
Also generalizing mistakes like that is risky bidnizz. After seeing students struggle to raise money if a proposed idea for a robot is a flat waste of money I'm not going to back the idea.
You can absolutely buy a robot which looks like it can compete, but that won't be seen until competition. Even then just because you have a competition ready robot doesn't mean you will actually win. I am not going to discourage teams from using COTS parts, but if you do go into competition with a Kit Rhino with grabber and you plan on winning then you better find a way to stand out in case you aren't a captain of an alliance. Some teams will fail to realize this and while they will come to competition people will find that will they might have a robot that gets the job done, its utilization on the floor is its only really "valued" depending upon exactly how many other identical robots are out there.
From my short time in FRC and on Chief Delphi I have come to the conclusion that the "Spirit of First" is whatever reasons someone has for joining it. Some people like seeing the glow of joy in a students eye, some people like the environment, some people like giving back to the community. FIRST robotics is amazing because of all the random things you can learn and take away from it. I just feel this is just another instance of something that happens often in the real world that also crops up in FRC. I wouldn't fight it I would just take the time to show students that this is sometimes the way of the world, and while I don't always agree with the world I still have to live with it.

I won't lie it is a mixed bag completely, but it tracking what sells out has made my life easier in the scout department.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I have yet to take any stance on if pre-fab systems should be allowed or not. I was just responding to those who have expressed concerns over pre-fab game specific systems and doubt that they will ever be sold, by predicting they will likely become a reality in the near future.

If I was a brilliant designer and had the manufacturing capabilities, I would look at designing a game specific subsystems using mainly the current COTS parts. Then sell a kit containing the 'custom' parts and instructions on how to assemble the 'custom' parts in the kit with standard COTS parts (sold separately). I believe these would be legal if each kit was priced under $400.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Kudos on the topic: As the worlds of both engineering and FIRST evolve, it's always good to step back and ask the question, "Does this new development really jive with the mission of FRC?" Regular discussions on such topics are healthy for any community and FRC is no exception.

I do think the question as to whether or not such prefabricated parts are a good think (or should permitted) is a fantastic question - but one that goes much deeper than simply whether or not AndyMark should provide game specific items. So, backing up a bit:

* Let's face it, there will never be perfect parity in FRC. A team located in the same community as a robotics engineering firm will have some significant advantages over teams in very rural areas. Likewise, in the Seattle area, we'd have some real advantages in games requiring flight (lots of Boeing engineers around here)... There is nothing wrong with this: Programs absolutely must work with their local industries.

* Teams that philosophically believe in having a 100% student-built bot will never put up such a glorious piece of machinery as one that is near 100% mentor built.

* Overall, we need the GDC to provide rules and guidelines that allow teams to have their own approaches to the game and allow them to work within the necessary frameworks of their local communities while maintaining some sense of a level playing field. (I don't envy the members of the GDC for this.)

* Pre-fabricated items add an interesting layer to all of this. On one side, they give the less-experienced teams a chance to at least play on the same field as those teams flush with strong mentors, great facilities and cash. On the other, they potentially cut into the kids' learning experience.

* Let's face it: very few of us want to see any supplier come up with a "Read-for-competition bot-in-a-box designed by professional robotics engineers and manufactured by NASA... All you have to do is put it together - 9/16th wrench provided. Estimated time of assembly: 2 hours." (No, this is not meant as a knock against any team). There needs to be a line somewhere.

* Giving a helping hand to teams is integral to the FIRST community. How does this fit in? Certainly a team new to the game and short on mentors would be far more able to put a functional robot on the field. It's always painful to see teams at a competition whose robot doesn't even roll.

* At the same time, it's not right if it is possible to put a competitive robot forward with little or no engineering knowledge. It seems fundamental to FRC that students must be forced to develop engineering skills and knowledge in order to compete. Students who have more such ability should be able to produce products superior than what students lacking such knowledge could produce.

* At some level, we all rely on suppliers to produce products for us- every team does. It's not like we are mining metal from the ground to produce our own aluminum....

* Two AndyMark products come to mind: The Rhino Treads and the Intake System. 948 students do almost everything by hand. We have no access to CNC machines or Jet cutting.. Students are very adept with hacksaws, hand drills, etc. So, if we are going to create precise cuts and functional devices, the construction takes a lot of time... We likely would have chosen a drive system with pneumatic wheels this year, but saw the Rhinos online. After much discussion, we figured that there would be very few performance disadvantages with the Rhinos - they would do the job well. By purchasing them, we saved a tremendous amount of labor and can now focus much more on our various manipulators... Yes, I felt a little guilty when I ordered them. We chose not to go with the intake system - we figured we could do much better.

* For our intake system, we spent time looking at FRC robots over the past decade that have had very good ball intake systems and found something that the Cheesy Poofs did a few years ago that could be altered just a wee for the purposes of this game. We studied photographs and video of their robot and found plenty to make what we believe will be an outstanding ball intake. To me, this is a hugely important aspect of engineering: We don't need to invent everything from scratch. Instead, we found systems that did similar things to what we need and adapted them. Why reinvent the wheel when we can learn from somebody else?

* We did something similar for our climbing mechanism... Our mentors had spent some time talking with another team at Champs last year about their bin-grabber.. I don't remember the team number off the top of my head, but they were great: They showed us how it all worked and a mentor responded to one of our students last spring when she emailed them for more information. Yes, their bin-grabber gave us a concept for our climber. Again, this is good engineering.

* Ri3D: These teams are great as they do give us all ideas. However, I wonder how "good" we want their robots to be? (I don't have an opinion here, I just wonder...). Here is why: We had been working on two promising prototypes for our shooter (one was a catapult design, the other a single-wheel shooter). We had just gotten to the point with both designs, when we were looking at the integration with other systems on our robot -especially so space constraints. We were just trying to solve those problems -something that is very good for students to have to work through. How do we load the ball into the catapult after grabbing it with our intake? How do we secure the ball as we take it on a pretty bumpy ride through the outer-works? How do we get that big wheel to fit into the fairly small space we have on the robot? The questions were hard - but really good problems to have to figure out..... But, we then saw something on one of the Ri3D robots that would solve all of those problems and do exactly what we wanted: Shooting accurately with range, adjustable shot distances, a clean integration with our intake system and fit into the space required. So... we scrapped our own ideas and took theirs. Yes, we are learning from the experience - but we are missing out on the problem-solving that would have been absolutely necessary if we had stuck with our own promising designs.

* I guess I look at the prefabricated parts as one more piece in the continuum of "support" available for FRC teams. I don't see the current AndyMark items as harmful to the experience. However, I do think they start to flirt with that line. After all, the moment kids stop needing to actually engineer their own robot and solve the problems presented in each game is the moment that FRC lose its magic. I just hope that these discussions continue on Chief Delphi and that the GDC continues to have them as well.

(Submitting without a proofread... My wife wants me to fold laundry... I hope I didn't ramble too much.):o

Just figured the largest player in the space Andymark is owned by Andy Baker a wwfa winner. It's not like this guy doesn't understand the program and want kids to learn.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I'm ambivalent about it. On one hand I like that more teams get more access to more capable mechanisms for less effort, time and money. That's all great. On the other hand it's lead to what I've started jokingly calling the 'hex shaft mono-culture'. Lord knows 95 has reaped the benefits of that as much as any team, and I'm not convinced there's really anything wrong with it so long as no aspect of it is obligatory (you don't have to buy gearboxes, after all).

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I like it. Of course, that won't really go into why... so here I go.

It brings the bottom up, making our collective product better and more exciting. A rookie team can buy a bunch of parts and get something that works.

But, at the same time, those parts can provide a foundation for "design-your-own". You can, after the season, take them apart and dissect the design. What is better: to buy 4 swerve modules, slap them on a frame, add in programming, and call it a day, or to buy ONE swerve module, take it to pieces and back to learn why it is doing what it's doing, and then design a custom one that better fits the team (or buy the other three later)?


My team likes custom--we do a lot of building. But we don't have a lot of precision equipment in the shop--we're still getting our mill online. Paul and John get quite a few orders from us for gearboxes and similar items--but those go onto custom framing welded together. And we have absolutely no qualms about copying something we've seen someone else, or ourselves, do in the past--though we do tend to do the rework to make it work with whatever we're doing that particular year.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

(As someone involved with FTC this year) The FTC rules for 2015-16 state:

So, it is not impossible that FRC may at some point have a similar sort of rule to push back on complete COTS solutions. (Though the specific rule would sure put a damper on shifting gearboxes, etc.)

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

These are the two points that I think are the most pertinent, and I think my differing opinion comes from my differing understanding of the second.

Can you put a minimally competitive FIRST Stronghold robot on the field this March with very little previous engineering knowledge? Yes. I don't think that is bad. I think it is a requirement that a rookie team not feel completely incompetent and disheartened after its first season, so there should be a support structure to allow any team to put something on the field. Can that team instead field a moderately competitive robot without adding anything to their repertoire of engineering knowledge? I don't think so. It seems to me that when you are a team that knows next to nothing, having these "plug and play" options can give you the ability to start moving up competitively, which makes the competition more appealing (that's the inspiration), which in turn fuels students' drive to learn more and pushes them further. And this model says nothing of the fact, which others have mentioned here, that it's a lot easier to recruit members, mentors, and sponsors when your robot works and looks impressive, which drives yet more improvement.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I challenge the notion that COTS parts are erasing the advantage of having experience and knowledge on your team. They simply augment your capabilities and allow your students to focus on building more non-COTS systems. As long as you can't literally buy a whole robot in a box, that will remain true.

I doubt that there are many teams who have the capabilities to build the same robot they actually did, but without the COTS components they used. The purpose of buying COTS is to save time and effort, so we would expect that taking away the COTS components would require teams to cut back on other mechanisms to have the time and manpower required to build those components from scratch instead. Perhaps students are plugging in a COTS gearbox to give themselves the time to properly design, build, and test an arm. They lose out on learning about designing a gearbox, but instead get to learn about designing an arm, and their robot is more competitive (which makes them more inspired) to boot. Is learning about one mechanism more valuable than the other? I say no, which is why I say COTS components don't take the experience away from anyone.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

In developing new products, I simply hope that suppliers do not encourage sacrificing resiliency in problem solving for convenience in executing a solution. Students who are taught that mindset are terrible Engineers, expecting where to be told a solution and the complaining when it doesn't "just work by pressing the button". "Business is Business" is a cop-out when it goes that far.

With that said, there are only a couple of current products available from the 5 main FRC suppliers that seem (IMO) to provide a direct and nearly complete solution rather than encourage finding and adapting a solution. The rest of them encourage us to try, try again, and eventually succeed :)

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

'Grumpy' 40 year old man here speaking for myself:
When I was a kid the closest thing you were gonna find to a pre-made robots were:

R/C cars
Model airplanes
RB5X robots (of which I have 2)
Heathkit Heros
Robotic arms
Armatron which is still really a toy
Legos with the original control box that was not battery operated at all

Now I am impressed with the variety of the kit parts.
I think it's great that it lets you build a robot part by part with barely any machine tools.

Here's the problem - it also lets you not learn how to use machine tools.
It lets you under-utilize tools you have.
It is teaching far too little about electronics.

So on the one hand I want FIRST to grow.
On the other I often wonder if FIRST is more about growing itself than challenging and encouraging the students to their full potential.
It is possible to win at these games without doing much down and dirty fabrication at all - and in fact - if you spend too much time getting too involved in that sort of thing you might actually work against yourself.

I think these limitations mean it's actually possible to outgrow FIRST:
I just put a AndyMark AM14U2 together with a complete RoboRIO control system, NavX, part of a pneumatic system, encoders and co-processor in 2 days. With the co-processor being the longest delay.
At some point it's possible some teams - if they plan really carefully - could be done in < 2 weeks.
So what is the project too big then?
I can see this actually getting boring.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Doesn't FIRST start the whole COT purchasing culture by providing a frame kit in the rookie kit of parts?

In my opinion, the line was crossed when you could buy a complete swerve drive system. The line continues to be crossed with the Rhino, intake and possibly actuator kit. But that's my line, yours may vary.

I am old school and will admit it. I'm not crazy about our culture that wants brand new teams to get instant satisfaction by being competitive at competion instantly. I still remember our rookie year, we told the kids it would be a long hard road and they had to earn their stripes. But hey, I don't like participation trophies either.

The flip side
I like the use of COTS like gear boxes. There is so much to do and learn in six weeks that our students can't do/learn it all. That's why we encourage them to switch sub teams from year to year. We suffer a little but they learn more.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JesseK View Post
In developing new products, I simply hope that suppliers do not encourage sacrificing resiliency in problem solving for convenience in executing a solution.
I really like that. I may steal that verbiage soon and often....

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Just to frame this conversation a little differently:

Look around at some of the reactions of some teams to the lack of pneumatic tires with easy to use hubs lately.

It was almost like the sky had fallen.
For just tires.

There was time when no one would have said a word (note my rookie year).

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

There will always be optimization. There will always be teams striving for perfection. Teams will always want to be the best, and that simply doesn't happen in less than two weeks.

I don't believe FRC will ever be boring for the general participants. It definitely won't for me. Even if I were to continue building my Ri3D robot for 6 weeks, I don't think it would get boring. There would always be improvements that I want to make.

A complacent engineer is a bad engineer.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Yes and one could make those improvements by simply buying more stuff and bolting it together. So that doesn't mean you are gaining any new skills as a fabricator or an engineer.

One could fill that time by building a practice bot but again that could be more consumption.

One could build a whole field to test on so that will fill more time maybe that would teach some fabrication skills assuming you didn't buy most of that as well.

The point still remains - we are entirely focused on that robot.
Not on all the opportunities some of these tools would offer.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

There will never be a day when 'Company A' sells a game specific solution that will be more optimized than the 254's and 1114's of the world. When that day comes then I 100% agree with you. Until that happens there will always be a place for teams to improve upon a prepackaged, game specific solution.

Hopefully they will make these improvements through the use of machine tools with the assistance of professional engineers and machinists who know how to work them.

The teams who choose not to improve upon the prepackaged solution are the teams who don't currently field a working robot. They will benefit more from the prepackaged solution than they will from building a box on wheels. The competition aspect of FRC will become more appealing to the general public which is a nice side effect of raising the competitive floor.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

That's the thing. Once you need those sorts of tools it becomes a project bigger than the 6 weeks or the students aren't solo on the really more complex tools if it's just those 6 weeks. Also people do just send parts out to be made professionally.

So really to those teams with the ability to deeply optimize you have something going on there bigger than FIRST.
There really isn't much in FIRST to reward or penalize for custom fabrication.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I disagree. There is no doubt that there are a number of teams that annually produce some very impressive robots. However, by the nature of FRC teams, all their pieces and parts are, to one degree or another, designed and built by students. I am convinced that a group of professional robotics engineers could work together to produce a better product than any team where students are an integral part of the design or fabrication of parts. If it is permitted, we will see an improvement of ready-made parts in time. Our suppliers are trying to make a profit (that's fine, of course); if their is a profit in creating better-performing pieces and parts, they will do so.

There does need to be a line - such as the FTC rule mentioned previously... I know I like the fact that we can start with the Kit Bot. I do wonder if the Rhinos go too far... I suppose I don't mind if pieces such as the AndyMark Intake are available, if they are not particularly good in comparison to what the average veteran FRC team can do on their own? (Kind of like the Kit Bot - it will roll around, but don't don't expect too much speed, pushing power, etc. without some refinement.) In other words, the struggling team can get something on the field and play the game, but will not be in a position to be stronger than teams with some know-how. )

Perhaps one differentiation could be here: Gearboxes, Actuators, etc. are not game-specific solutions. It is still up to teams to figure out how to use them. The Rhino drive and the intake are something more than that...

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Agreed. COTS parts level the playing field by providing lower-resource teams with affordable, premade options that will fit their needs well enough. However, a team who relies solely on COTS systems will find that their performance is much the same- off-the-shelf, just like everyone else. Although COTS assemblies raise the baseline for competitive robots, they don't hurt teams who put time and effort into mechanisms of their own design.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I don't really buy the arguments that having more COTS components brings the bottom up relative to the top, although they do certainly bring everyone up. Even though there has been a steady increase in FRC-specific COTS components over the past few years, OPR distributions have remained similar. It would be interesting to see these same plots from even earlier years though. COTS components do indeed bring the bottom up, but that statement alone is misleading, because if so, they also bring the top up by a pretty comparable amount.

I am convinced though that having easily accessible drive components makes it very difficult for teams not to field driving robots. I would love it if we could get to the same point with mechanisms.

The times from before the kit chassis were the Dark Ages. We are in the Renaissance now, and after the ravaging Stronghold wars are finished, AndyMark, VEXPro, WCP, and many others will bring us so many good COTS parts that every robot will not only be able to drive, but will also have functional mechanisms. Then, we will enter the Enlightenment, and the whole world will be inspired by our amazing robots that can all actually do something.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

This. One of our mentors engineers ocean data collection and transmission systems. Most of his designs are 80-90% COTS parts integrated with the critical 10%-20% that make the system meet the requirements. There are some major companies out there who sell and service operating systems that are 90% open source and 10% custom. When a COTS product meets a one-off requirement at a decent price, designing and building a custom solution is bad engineering.

Likewise, our team starts with pre-engineered COTS drive trains, gearboxes, motors, and mounting brackets when available, and designs and assembles them to meet the requirements of our strategy, which was decided in order to meet the requirements of the game. I can't think of a time that we used anything mechanical that was more complex than a gearbox without making some modifications to it to suit our game strategy. Last year we turned the 2015 KoP chassis into an H-drive, this year we're making a 10 wheel drive starting from the same kit. We were working on a leading wedge for our robot that matches the one AndyMark will be selling soon; once we expected this to happen, we did the prototype but canceled the design and construction of the competition wedge, and moved on to even more manipulator design. This is a miniature version of the real-world situation in many, many fields.

The $400 limit does a pretty good job of preventing "prefab" robots. If a team showed up with a robot built and programmed 100% according to plans available from a vendor or on-line, there would be little STEM inspiration. When a team shows up with a well-running original design that is composed of 90+% COTS parts, learning and inspiration are all but certain to have been part of the process.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Andy, I don't take your post as a bash, so please don't take mine as a bash either.

Personally, I think if someone thinks that heavy use of COTS components in a robot stifles learning, creativity, and problem solving, then that person is lacking in a little thing called imagination.

We LOVE LOVE LOVE COTS parts. VEXPro is our go-to COTS system, and the bonus is that they share our color scheme :D

The reason I bring up imagination is because the ways that COTS parts are creatively implemented is what is important. I think one issue is the very wrong implication that building with COTS yields a lack in creativity or learning value. I think it's quite the opposite. With COTS parts, we can prototype and iterate many times faster than if we had to fabricate more things from scratch. The most important part of our design process is iterating. This is what I feel can be most valuable to learn during the build season. Taking time to custom design something with the intent of learning skills should be left for the pre- and post-season.

It seems like some people think using COTS parts is a plug and play game, but it really isn't, at least on my team. It's more of a game of plug and fail, plug again, and it's kind of OK now, do some math, plug again, and well, it looks great but need to do better, plug again, and finally it works the way we want!

Some may disagree with me on this, but with the six weeks you're given, there's no time to learn through making everything custom! That takes up precious time that could be spent making prototypes and constantly improving them until they can no longer be improved. That's how progress is made in technology in the real world. The biggest technological advances don't come from one isolated design, or from some person making an original breakthrough seemingly out of nowhere. These advances come from years and even generations of gradual iteration and building upon the knowledge acquired from others.

Real engineers don't have to build everything they design, and that idea can apply to FRC teams too. If my team can put together a VEXPro ball shifter, and not bother with building a custom gearbox, then we will do it! But can we build our own gearboxes, and do we have students with the skills to design them? Yes! Because they did that learning in the other part of the year known as the off-season, where we have time to step back and go through the details with both FRC and non-FRC related projects.

If we don't spend time fabricating systems that can be bought already, then that gives us the time to fabricate the systems that really have to be custom. We may LOVE LOVE LOVE COTS, but COTS doesn't give us everything. We CNC and 3D print our own parts, weld our frame, and make our own composites. It's COTS parts that allow us to focus on the custom systems of our robots, so those systems are better tuned and ready for competition. If we had spent time machining drive transmissions, the most basic of systems that can be taught in the pre-season, then we would have less time, energy, and resources into making custom systems work, and work well.

By the time this build season is over, we will have built/worked with four robots: Concept (mostly built pre-season as an adaptable chassis), Prototype, Practice, and Competition. Without COTS parts at the ready, we wouldn't be able to do this. It is this iterative process that shows students what true learning is. True learning isn't limited to being able to recall past instructions enough to design a custom gearbox or having the skills to mill everything manually. True learning is being able to develop meta-cognition, or in other words, self reflection in what has, can, and will be done. This is what the iterative process gives to our students. It shows them that rarely is anything done on the first try. Neither is building anything easy, even with the amount of perceived convenience that COTS parts can deceptively give to teams who won't see COTS parts as something that they can make their own in some creative manner.

If we can buy an entire intake system, arm system, or shooting system, we will. But you sure can bet that our students will break it down, rebuild, tinker, and tweak it to make it suited to our own strategic needs better than what the assembly instructions recommend.

A team that heavily relies on COTS parts only misses out on the learning of building a robot if their mentors and students lack the creativity to "own" those parts and make something original from them. For that kind of team, the problem isn't in the prefabricated parts, but in the limits of their imagination. Why not buy a COTS part and ask, "can I use this for something it isn't intended for?" (but safely)

Teaching meta-cognition through the iterative process is one way to keep in mind that FRC isn't all about the robot, but about learning the skills that can make a student a productive and articulate member of society. This self reflection is one of those skills. Focusing on making students learn particular niche skills like fabricating custom parts is to lean more on the "it's all about the robot" side of the spectrum.

By no means am I saying that custom fabricating parts that are available COTS is a bad thing. If your team is capable of it, by all means go ahead. My main point is that with the short time we are given to make a competitive machine, it is OK to opt for the quicker option, and save the more technical learning for the off-season. Also, I'm not saying that build season is not the time to learn technical skills. There's plenty of time in the season to learn technical skills, but that should be through the systems that are unique to the team design and the year's game, not something that can always be designed during off-season, such as drive transmissions (which rarely change season to season) and experimental systems (e.g. if a team wants to do swerve the first time, they first do it pre-season instead of after kickoff)

COTS parts are as valuable a learning too as you make them.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

COTS is not a panacea.

Ask the US Military about parts obsolescence or security and quickly the issues COTS creates will appear.

http://www.militaryaerospace.com/blo...t-go-away.html

https://www.cigital.com/papers/download/ses.pdf

Now the FIRST challenge of a project too big in a time too small really does have benefit from COTS. It allows under-resourced teams to deliver on something they couldn't otherwise deliver without some serious pain.

On the other hand - personally I think it comes a bad time in their careers.
When one can continuously get financial resources from other people and direct them towards COTS vendors instead of learning the more base principals from the moment they were first old enough, and responsible enough, to understand those principals I think we might be robbing some of the students, in the long term, the value of tactile experience (even if it's hard work) early on.

To this concept let's theorize in direct relation to Dean Kamen himself. Would Dean have had the opportunity to found FIRST if his work did not show unique determination early on to acquire the resources to materialize on his ideas?

I won't deny that when I was younger I certainly used TTL chips which are COTS digital circuits and still maintain a large surplus of them. However they were inexpensive and you had to work to build something from them. The knowledge I acquired from learning how to integrate their functions together was invaluable when moving into programmable logic. While I certainly do not miss hours bread boarding and wire-wrapping circuits - I do often see the price people pay for not having that experience. Simple things to me like: delay lines, are confounding to a new generation of people who never saw a race state up close and personal. So they connect macro cells together so many years later (college and later) than when I started working with TTL at age 8 and can't understand why the resulting responses are unstable.

I think sometimes that in order to make FIRST appear ever more impressive we are trading the illusion of hard experience for the quick delivery of something that looks cool using COTS. Something that justifies more investment into it because it looks cool. Something that might not be delivering at the educational level what the casual onlooker might be thinking it is delivering.

I consider it something very much like 'my kid is a computer genius' syndrome. Where every generation looks at their own personal reference for 'genius' and assumes that their child reached the equivalent proficiency without out realizing that they are bootstrapped on the COTS of the last people who did it. Yes your child was able to write a web based accounting system. On what amounts to a supercomputer from when I was a child with a language that would be appalling inefficient on what was the practical computer when I was a child. The math is not that much more complicated and the protocols and languages were given to them basically for free. I'll issue a challenge here: anyone can write their own protocol for an IP network using UDP. In the financial industry at any place where latency is the determining factor between success and failure writing non-TCP protocols is often the tool of choice. Yet in FIRST we often seem to run away from UDP screaming because TCP 'just works' and you 'don't have to do that work'. This makes TCP basically COTS. Yes using TCP saves the user from the effort to make their work reliable on an average IP network. At the price of the user very likely not actually understanding how it even works - however FIRST is not exactly the average IP network - so what you have here is a perfect example of not understanding why the easy way may not actually be the best way.

It is very cool to watch - but lots of people own cars today - and lots of people can't change a tire properly. So the proposition becomes we expose everyone to the robotics technology like cars and hope that this makes more shining stars because it is accessible. However it is accessible within basically 4, 6 week build seasons and after that - as an adult - you now have to pay for continuing access often at a dear price (see rising college debt). Now I do see this is where the Maker community helps. Where we network our skills and resources together at a reasonable price to break this high cost consequence to not getting the basics in sooner (I spent many hours at NextFAB taking a vast number of their classes and I can clearly see the very wide gap in knowledge when people approach a subject in those required classes). However there is still a large social gap between the two. I see where coming back from being a student to a mentor can help as well. However there are many topics on ChiefDelphi as to the risk of coming back as a mentor and people often can't because the demands of college on their resources are very high.

This is a devil's due. We are advancing our primary cause of FIRST with COTS but we may not be advancing the educational goal one might casually think we are advancing.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I have read a lot of posts, and like that this thread has not turned too heated. So here is my two cents. As a teacher, I don't think using COTS parts necessarily mean students learn any less than they would without them. It is all in how you conduct your design and construction process. We do make use of COTS parts. We also have used chassis we designed and built for 10/14 FRC seasons. We go through a brainstorming - prototyping - testing phase in which we use whatever resources we have at hand to build and test various mechanisms. Once we settle on a basic design, we look for how best to implement it.

For example, last year one of our mentors found a place that was selling some old garage door opener lead screw assemblies. We used these because they were affordable. The students then had to use a combination of calculation and testing to figure out what gear box assembly would be the best to operate it. The calculations showed that we were right on the edge between two and three motors, so we selected a Vexpro gear box that could be used with two or three motors. After a couple of failures we settled on a AndyMark hex hub bored out on one end to accept the lead screw. In the end the kids had a good device and understood its operation well.

I think there is a software analogy to be made here. As techhelpbb pointed out, where kids start today with languages and processing power is amazing compared to where I started (fortran punch cards on an old VAX-11/780). As someone who teaches programming, I also know that my students in general use much better practices in designing programs than I did. Precisely because they are not worried about things like using short variable names to take up less space in memory. I know a number of people who lament that kids learn Java or C++ or Php before learning Assembly. "They need to know how computers really work." But that isn't Assembly, which is really just abstraction at a lower level. "They don't learn how to optimize a program's performance." Wrong. Plain and simple. They still learn about optimizing, but they optimize algorithms and not code. Using prebuilt libraries. Because that is the way they will need to operate when they get jobs. I find that students who learn assembly first tend to write code that is very difficult to read and maintain. It is much easier to teach (and learn) assembly after students have a solid understanding of higher level language.

OK, I am getting a little far afield now. So back to my main point. If you are a mentor and thinking about this question, your students are probably doing fine and learning well. Because the real question isn't whether they build their own gearbox or use one from AndyMark. It's whether they understand what the gearbox does and why you chose it.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Yes they can certainly get a job - even if they can't optimize their work. They might even be the next FaceBook and still not be able to optimize their work. My actual job besides my personal businesses is leading DevOps for a huge financial institution with about 10,000 developers. My software has been at the core of the financial markets since I was 16 (reviewed, of course, by other programmers with much greater experience at the time). The first time I wrote software that was used by my family business at IT&T and NYMEX in passing as a tool I was 11 years old.

I agree that we would be foolish to discourage the students from taking the more interesting path by using these cool tools (like COTS) we as their seniors (I am 40...when did that happen!) give them for free. However I also want to emphasize that it's easy to encourage them to take the interesting path and totally ignore the foundation. Which works great till it is a major problem (see computer security, Windows Millenium, Windows Vista's task scheduler). Then the difference between those that have the hard foundation and really any interest in that foundation will show.

This is why we can churn out and through programming consultants like water but certain highly regarded entities are looking for the needles in the haystack. So what it boils down to is: does FIRST actually make it easier for those that will be the 'needle in the haystack' who become the most valuable employees to the economy to gain interest and grow. Does COTS help those 'needles in the haystack' or does it make it easier for other people to make them take the easy path when they have the luxury of time to explore the hard path?

I've seen the outcome of this go 5 ways:
1. We've got brilliant students at cool places now that definitely did things the hard way in FRC and gained for it.
2. We've got students now who have realized that the easy way got the job done in FRC but now they need to learn the hard way with all the added pressures of school and adult life.
3. We've got some students that I think might have been better off with the challenge being greater as a participant in FRC because they had more talent and opportunity than they realized.
4. We've got students that took the hard way and it was too much for them.
5. We've got students that rode their talent and when the hard way showed up it was too much commitment for them.

It think it is unavoidable that COTS must stay in FIRST. Just as FIRST must continue to offer high level programming languages. The question then becomes - how does FIRST honor the value of the base engineering and fabrication skills and contribute to the students developing those base skills. Right now I don't think FIRST really has any protection for that flow. If it continues like this it's entirely possible schools will have shops full of tools and they will be a like pretty cars that no one drives.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I love having a wide variety of COTS parts...they let all of us bring to life so many more wild ideas....

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I think the doing things the hard way vs. doing things the easy way is a false dichotomy. Again, it is about how you use the resources available to you. I have a ton of former students working at cool places and they pretty much all started by learning Pascal, C++ or Java. The key is they learned how to analyze problems then develop and test good algorithms. Their are FRC teams that use all or almost all custom parts where very few students know how or why those parts are created. And teams that use all custom parts where many kids are involved in the design, fabrication and testing of those parts. I don't think there is an intrinsic "right way" and "wrong way" to do this. As I said, if you are part of this discussion you are probably aware enough of the issues to make sure your students learn.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

This I entirely agree with. COTS can be used or it can be abused. I can see a team fielding an entire COTS robot bolted together still be successful at teaching the base skills for their team of that year. Maybe they are an engineering school and the FIRST robot was just a passing milestone.

The thing is: there's not much in FIRST that interlocks the concepts of 'how you use the resources available to you' for education versus to simply produce the robot. Obviously if you don't 'use the resources available to you' to build a robot you won't be able to compete. However there is no assurance that anyone used those resources to more widely educate. I am not even sure there's a prize for it and I think maybe there should be something more there.

I can see, MathKing because you have tangible results, that you are delivering on the educational side of this and I'd like to see that rewarded. It should not just be about delivering the robot and that is even a FIRST slogan.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

This is my second year in FRC. We bought Rhino two hours after kickoff. Does it feel "too easy?" Sure. I did not want to pass up on a competitive advantage. We did the KoP chassis in our rookie year and did not get it until the end of Week 1. We have limited resources and would have gone the KoP with pneumatics like most others. I predict the end results in six weeks would be very similar with either choice. Except the students will learn about the advantages and disadvantages of a track drive instead of a second year of six-wheel. We all start with some level of COTS after all.

I have a 9th grader who has never programmed and speaks little English. She has learned LabView and has figured out joystick, pneumatics, relays, NavX, Drive, sonar, autonomous, limit switches, Talon soft limits, PID and encoders. Starting at a higher level of software abstraction made this possible. If she wants, she can pursue a proper education in software engineering based upon this introduction. FIRST. Same can be said for mechanical systems. We inspire them to further pursue an interest in engineering or science. FRC is not the College of Engineering. It is one path to the door to the college.

In the end, I think FIRST might consider the pros and cons of sharing the game beforehand with suppliers that make game-specific COTS. That is the real issue under discussion here, not gearboxes. As for me, I'll buy the equivalent of Rhino drive next year if I can. We do not have a machine shop (or hospital or Home Depot) in our county. I want my kids to have a positive experience compared to kids that have their workspace at NASA. Looking at you my fellow Texan friends on 118! Y'all inspire us because of your history and resources. If COTS gives my kids a better overall experience on a very un-level playing field, I'm all in.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I don't want to discourage students from going to college. However my intent in what I am about to link and write is to encourage students to understand that time is time - it moves forward - and one should always make the most of the time you have.

The hard analysis is that we can't rely on college to make up for the opportunities we miss teaching today.

The longer the time you put into something the more practiced you can be at it. So while I value the late bloomer and otherwise disadvantaged as deeply as anyone else - I worry we can easily create a system where we waste great opportunity in the name 'we can fix that later'.

Ask any system administrator: 'I'll do it later' often means it won't get done and very few can afford to remain in college for very long periods of time.

FRC is huge. It gives awards for so many diverse things. We should be able to find a way to balance an award or reward for those that manage to teach the fundamental skills in: engineering and fabrication (we already do for programming we somewhat do for engineering) and can show that and the value it returns on an FRC field. If we can manage this then it doesn't matter what COTS stuff is in the community. In parallel we are helping those that are at a disadvantage by letting them challenge those who are not disadvantaged with what the community can cook up in the form of COTS.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

EXACTLY! This is precisely my point about imagination in my last post on this thread. There's a whole world of possibilities with COTS parts only if you choose to be creative with them.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I think that the COTs products are great. I'm willing to match wire wrap skills with "techhelpbb", and I am also coming from his background. But COTS parts make it easier for teams to build a robot and compete and I'm willing to put out a thesis that says COTS parts makes it easier for teams to sustain themselves.

The RI3D teams show how COTS stuff can come together to make something and I think that is a positive sign. I think that having COTS parts allows teams to try to pull some feature (swerve drive, shooter, climber) and focus on that while knowing that they can manage the rest of the robot.

Big fan of VEX, AndyMark and West Coast. But there are other places to look for parts. That was the good thing about the early days. "Why no that's not a drill that is a drive train!" Can you find all the parts to build a robot at Bed Bath and Beyond? (Hint, those stand mixers have pretty heavy duty planetary transmissions).

I like the "stand on the shoulders of giants" theory. I like that teams can build on what others have done. But I agree with techhelpbb, at some point roboteers need to be able to dig down and look at what the things are built on. In the programming world TCP is the bucket we can carry data in. And while I can design and code a UDP based system that would send 35 frames a second to the driver station the question becomes "what can I do instead of that". COTS will never replace just sitting down and thinking about the problem and put forth multiple solutions.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

My thoughts: Industry is trending in this direction. When I started at my company in 2005 I was on a particular project for military grade equipment. Everything about the hardware was custom designed including the chassis, the cooling system, the custom PowerPC based processor cards running VxWorks. Installing the software required hooking up to this box with a laptop over a serial cable and flashing the box with the custom boot image.

Now, 10 years later, the modern version of this box is basically: a standard intel PC, packaged in a rugged enclosure. Install a standard flavour of Linux. Deploy the software as a Linux RPM. It is so much simpler and allows us to focus on the "real" problems (bugs in our software) rather than get hung up on configuring, modifying, repairing hardware and lab equipment.

Knowing when to invent your own and knowing when to go with an established solution is itself an important design skill.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

The question for me is: why hasn't someone just done that?
Once they do and open source it the solution can easily be the equivalence of COTS.

I get that FIRST/FRC may not want to be in that business either but it's clearly well within the scope of the skills the community can bring together. So are we dropping TCP in there just to avoid looking at the gorilla in the room?

If I didn't think the military would immediately grab any work I did on this and put it into drones I might do this myself.

I agree there is definitely value in not pushing unnecessarily uphill.

I recently have been helping a mechanical engineering firm to upgrade some data capture equipment that is somewhat high speed but also has many features you could do with a laptop from Walmart.

Their previous solution was very hardware intensive for things that would have been better served from software. It was very custom through the whole process and once it acquired data that was hugely unnecessary.

Surely the folks that designed it showed they were very interested in locking them in and getting to play with all those elements, but it drove the cost per unit over $10,000 and that was likely not necessary.

Surely it is a difficult to capture 1Msps at 24bits for 9 channels differential at these levels cleanly and that's an engineering issue. Pushing that data over a wireless to a Cloud that's actually been done and can be replicated.

So yes it matters not to over engineer - but you can under-engineer if you don't know any better.
In the case of this unit I was working in clearly there was a little of both.
Hopefully when we finish they'll have a COTS data acquisition module which solves the core acquisition issue.
The rest they can filter and modify in software with whatever expendable PC hardware they can find.

I have no doubt that the person that built this originally is a competent developer of FPGA based hardware.
They thought the rest would best be served by things like sticking a Raspberry Pi in there - COTS that makes no sense in this system.

System integration, which is what this is, requires a a wide enough experience to know where the edge of the box is.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Yes! There are other forms of competition where all one can use are COTS hardware, say in some classes of motorsports such as the Porsche Supercup. The competition is no less fierce. There is no lack of learning opportunities for the participants.


Is FIRST Lego League not inspiring for its intended audience? In FLL, the competitors can only use un-modified Lego manufactured parts which seem to qualify them to be described as COTS parts.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

FLL is age appropriate. The people who participate in FLL will not be driving actual automobiles themselves within 2 years in many states (games do not count). I also don't mentor FLL, even though I am a NJ State level judge. It would drive me 'up a wall' that I wouldn't be able to do all the things I can do with the MindStorms because of the necessary FLL restrictions.

When I did play with the original Lego Technic control system I kept making new sensors for it. That required soldering and that's not for everyone at those ages. Lego almost sued me for writing a detailed document on hacking it as a kid and then releasing it on "something called the Internet" and a few BBS. Luckily they are much nicer to those with interest these days.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

LOL...

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

That is funny but look around at the limited number of Technic sets available in most stores these days.

I still have a 12 gallon tub of Technic pieces with pnuematics and the lot - all of it bought locally.

Lego has actually in some ways gone backwards.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I really, really want to take apart my stand mixer now...

Anyway, I think you've made a very good point. The purpose of COTS parts is to streamline the design process. Instead of spending loads of time making small, individual aspects of the robot work, COTS parts enable you to skip the tiny details and go directly to the "big picture," that is, the design of the robot itself, as opposed to the design of its gearboxes, wheels, extrusion, etc. However, it cannot be denied that custom fabricated systems, if made properly, can usually do the job better than an off-the-shelf solution. Why? Because something made custom for the specific purpose it is going to fill will inherently perform better than a more general system of the same construction quality. There's nothing wrong with COTS parts, but putting the time and effort into a really good custom mechanism will (almost) always be worth it.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Haha, no worries, I don't. I was just a little worried that the discussion would turn into a flame war before the _real_ discussion started, so I was a bit defensive (plus I'd just finished shoveling after the snowpacolypse so...) . Reading the discussion now (and holy cow it's exploded over the last day) I'm really stoked with where this discussion is going.

I'm seeing lots and lots of great opinions, and even a sort of consensus about COTS parts.

As I Read further, I'm starting to see my viewpoint change a bit too with the way people frame the issue.

This is one of my favorite replies so far

And I think that's the center of my worry too. Problem solving is important and you can't start problem solving by trying to design an airliner, you've got to start small. Where better to start that process than at the lowest (reasonble :) ) level possible?

For example, to jump into software-land. We're using Java now, and Java has a hozillion great libraries for everything under the sun, INCLUDING lots of fantastic FRC open-source projects that we could leverage. This is a LOT like COTS mech/electrical parts.

I let my students use these libraries, even if (and when) they do find them on their own, but under one condition. I get them to understand the concepts and reasons WHY that library existed.

NAVx MXP is a great example; No one is going to expect every student to understand sensor fusion, and kalman filtering, on top of a robust I/O protocol. That's Crazytown. I'm sure some particularly bright students might be able to get it. I don't expect them to reverse-engineer anything, but I do help them understand what a Filter is, and why it's important.

A yearly project for new students is to build a simple complementary filter that eats gyro data & a single magnetometer and produce a smoothed heading. This is a simple (mathematically too) project that helps them understand just what's happening under the hood. Once that project is done, the concepts are understood, I give the go-ahead and they pull in the NAVX libraries and navigate away! No re-designing the wheel, the guys at kauailabs did a fantastic job, better than we can expect to in 6 weeks, so by all means lets leverage that.

That is how I feel about larger COTS Parts. If you use them, that's great, just make sure the backup knowledge is there, the why, the question to the answer.

Thanks again guys for the fun discussion

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Software is getting to the point where not much needs to be done to get it to work. GRIP is a fantastic example of that this year. It takes most of the effort in getting vision code down to a bare minimum. That being said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. For many other non FRC projects, vision has always been a hassle. Whether it's getting libraries to be recognized correctly, installing OpenCV, or cluttering code, it's never been quite as straightforward as I would have liked. With GRIP though, I don't think I will ever have to worry about that again. Although it only supports exports to FRC network tables, it seems like it shouldn't be too difficult to modify the export so that it can be used in non FRC projects. Does it take a lot of the work out of getting vision code? Absolutely! Would I ever go back or tell students to go back to hard coding it for the sake of doing it manually? Probably not. Especially since it makes it easier to transition into more advanced concepts. As new platforms make things easier to code, new things will likely emerge to take it's place.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

http://www.wcproducts.net/mcc2016/

I wasn't going to comment on this thread, but this is just going way too far.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

How is it different from a robot in 3 days?

All of the parts are COTS parts, save for a few custom gussets.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

What? A bunch of COTS parts not directly designed for any game specific tasks built to play the game? I don't see what's wrong here. They aren't selling a robot in a box. They aren't even selling a climber or manipulator in a box. It's just raw products that can be modified to be useful.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

One of the Ri3D "rules" was to not release CAD drawings full CAD models.

According to that site:

I would regard their intent as completely different to Ri3D (even the AndyMark team, who use a lot of AM products).

That's not a criticism of WCP or this product, but I think it would be unfair to the Ri3D teams to group the two together. This is clearly one step beyond what they do, and what the KOP does.

EDITED: Apparently totally wrong, struck through comment

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Not even close to true. Actually, thank you for reminding me to post the 'Snow Problem CAD model. You can find that here (or in my signature).

Ri3d teams are encouraged to release CAD what are you even saying.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Apologies - I'll retract amend the statement. I swear I heard that referenced in one of the videos - I must have misheard.

EDIT: Found it. So what I heard was "full CAD model". Video

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

A lot of good discussion here. Thanks to everyone for being so respectful and for not getting devolving into name calling. I respect that in the Chief Delphi crowd. Thanks.

As to my views, listen, I design gearboxes for a living and I am SO GLAD to be out of the gearbox biz for FIRST. Having so many great gearboxes that we can just order lets the team focus on implementing their ideas rather than the details of involutes, center distances, ...

It is not just in the mechanical world that things are getting easier and better.

Coding:
What about compilers? Why should we steal the experience of writing in assembly from our kids?

Electronics:
What about MEMS sensors? Why back in my day, we didn't have none of these new fangled gyros telling us what our angular rate was, no sir e bob. We had to LOOK at our robots and tell THEM what direction they were headed.

Coding (again):
PID loops implemented in WPI libraries? What? and steal the experience of writing an anti-wind up integral term from the coding team? Are you nuts?

Design:
What about CAD? Why are we taking away the experience of hand drawing section views to discover interferences?

Electronics (again):
Beaglebones? Raspberry Pis? Teenseys? Arduinos? Bla! Why teams should layout their own 6808 boards. Puts hair on your chest!

The tools get easier and better in every field. These enable better and better solutions. For everyone. The top teams, the bottom teams, and the middle teams.

I think it is more inspirational. Period.

So, I'm all for them.

Dr. Joe J.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Only Team Indiana doesn't release their CAD files.

2 years ago, Vex had Built Blitz, which had teams of some of the most brilliant minds in FIRST designing and building robots in 3 days for the 2014 game. There was a thread raising a stink about it here. The topic isn't new, but the MCC isn't as competitive as the Team JVN robot was in 2014(No offense to RC or any of the WCP team that worked on the MCC bot :) ). I don't understand why people will continue to say that ideas like WCP's MCC bot and Ri3D are going "too far". Being able to see cool ideas work early in the season is great for drawing inspiration from and building on top of. Sometimes we need to give our kids an idea of what's been done before so they can think beyond and better.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

The Ri3D teams can each obviously choose their own rules, but I've amended my comment to refer to what I heard:

For reference, I'm not saying WCP nor Ri3D are going "too far". I perceived that there was a difference in intent between WCP and Ri3D:

• Ri3D - to inspire prototyping, designing, strategizing
• WCP - to provide a (base) off-the-shelf robot solution

That may be my misinterpretation, but again, I don't personally see anything wrong with either intent.

EDIT: according to WCP, the MCC is more like Ri3D, intended to show how to effectively use their products.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I think this string of posts may clear up the issue of the "kits". While the MCC robot is designed with mostly COTS parts I think it is to show what is possible, and not just to create a robot that you will see copies of on the FRC playing field

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

A very healthy way to look at these quick build activities coming from suppliers and other large organizations is that it can serve as an opportunity for a few mentors in FRC to offer their experience, musings, and obsessions over the sport to students they don't even know. Everyone on these assignments has volunteered their time to FIRST programs in one way or another and now they have found a way that both encourages their business model and a type of corporate social responsibility.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

The teams don't exist to make the competitions the best they can be. The competitions exist to make the teams the best they can be.

If you are using prefabricated parts to produce better students in a better team, then I think there is a very good chance we see eye to eye. If your group is using prefab parts for a different reason, I might be harder to convince. YMMV.

Much of what I have read here seems to revolve around where people fall in this spectrum.


Blake

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I hope I'm not repeating something already written:

Let's follow current trends to one of their likely conclusions.

I pretty sure that in the not too distant future, some company, people, or person will sell a full, high-performance, does-great-on-the-field, FRC robot (the moving vehicle, the software, and the operator controls). They will sell it in the form of a bill-of-materials, plus instructions, plus published software, plus parts ready to be assembled. They will offer it sometime in the middle of build season.

When that happens will FRC be alive and well? Or will that be the beginning of the end?

Discuss ...

Blake

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Im fairly confident that if it ever came to that, FIRST would just modify the rules as needed. They may even just ban the entire kit to make a point so other companies don't try the same thing.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Here is where I feel the WCP robot and the Ri3D robots differ:
* With Ri3d, it is understood that they are merely examples, ideas - not something that teams are meant to copy.
* With the WCP robot, it is meant to be sold in a kit as a competitive robot. From their advertisement: "A Minimum Competitive Robot is a robot specifically engineered to be a vaulable asset to any alliance, while still being simple and accessible to any team, regardless of experience or resources. The WestCoast Products 2016 MCC robot is designed with the intent of ensuring teams have a greater chance of not only being chosen for an alliance in the eliminations routs, but also leading their own alliance as a part of the top 8 seeds." And later, "We show that teams can build a competitive robot in a matter of days."

This fundamentally changes FRC. I've been to enough district and regional events to say that I agree with the assessment of the ability of this robot: It will be one of the stronger ones at most events. (Think top ten, but generally not top three or four.) In other words, with zero engineering skills, a team can build a robot that is better than the vast majority of their competitors - without having to spend six weeks working their tails off designing the thing. Instead, they can build it "in a few days" and have several weeks to practice driving. most teams hoping to qualify for Champs will find that their most effective path is through purchasing of a pre-engineered kit.

"It inspires kids." No, it excites them. It's like the kid in my math class who wants extra credit for an "A" when he's really earning a "D-." Moreover, I would suggest that teams who worked hard for six weeks and build a solid robot would be very "uninspired" if beaten by a team that bought the kit and qualified for Champs. The true benefit and value of first comes in the engineering that happens over the six weeks of build. The time the kids and mentors exchange ideas as to how to best engineer a robot to solve the game.... It's the time that the kids have to work in high-stress situations and yet still function as a team... It's the repeated failures that ultimately lead to success.... The events? they are nothing more than the fun reward at the end.

I recognize that I may think very differently than many folks about this - I have plenty of personality flaws and I don't mean to insult anybody... However, in my mind, this just seems fundamentally wrong...

Consider the next steps:
* AndyMark, a competitor, produces a better MCC robot.
* WCP, to outdo AndyMark, produces a kit for a high goal shooter - that integrates perfectly with their kit..
* Etc.

"It raises the floor for all teams." I disagree. It makes the robots on the field prettier. It does not do anything to raise the level of engineering on FRC teams.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I can see two things
-- The ads will say, "Act now and the first kits will ship with a free 3 member drive team.
-- The "mentor built robot" threads will be "kits assembled by mentors" thread
all which will occur well after the first water game. So I'm not worried about full kits like this for many years.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

There's a few likely outcomes I can see coming from something like that:

1. Teams will buy it and still not be able to assemble it correctly.
2. Teams will not bother to read the rules and not be able to use it correctly.
3. Teams will not be able to drive it correctly because they didn't read the manual.
4. Teams will replace what I've often seen as CSA: that magical few kids who are the keystones of the team, with a series of support calls to these people.
5. Teams won't be able to fix it in the pits because they really will have no idea what they have and it will be so expensive the team won't be able to risk it.
6. Teams will find the shipping and availability dates restrictive.

In reality we already have something like this.
Buy any CNC machine too expensive for your team.
It's a robot, you did not build, that you probably have to do some assembly and repair on.
If you break it you also probably can't fix it yourself.

Will FIRST go on? Sure it will.
Will the people that do this not exploit their opportunities to the fullest? Yes.
Might they show up while other teams are trying to be custom and do more engineering and fabrication are delayed? Yes.
Would I want to mentor that team? Not at all and they wouldn't need my help either.
So since they don't need mentors there goes the community involvement.

People do this today. There are teams where the mentors build the robots and there are teams that basically send most of the robot out to be constructed. I guess maybe the goal is to focus merely on design? Maybe the goal is merely to focus on driving? Maybe the goal is to make it look like you are getting more out of this than you really are.

In any event if FIRST lets that go on in the extreme without putting some controls in place all they will have is: donors, purchasing, drivers and volunteers. The control doesn't need to be to stop it - just give award and reward where other teams can show they went the extra mile to fabricate and engineer themselves. Otherwise, sooner or later, this outside professional involvement will raise the bar so high that when the kids do participate the adults making money will have them locked out.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I agree, and note that the difference in opinion in this thread is not whether or not we should use COTS. Many haved waxed eloquently about the benefits of standing on the shoulders of giants.

What we should agree on is that a line should be drawn somewhere (and perhaps the $400 part limit is already good enough. If FIRST's rules allow certain behaviors, and many FRC teams see a competitive advantage, it is hard to fault a team for pursuing those advantages.


Ri3D has pushed into and been embraced by our FIRST culture. As a coach, I have had to adapt to that change. In order to continue using FIRST's platform to inspire students, there certainly has been more struggle for students to explore their own ideas first. Thankfully, we've learned how to re-structure our design process to accomodate (and gain from Ri3D) allowing for more creativity to flow out in the analysis of different solutions and customizing our own.

The tendency towards more game-specific COTS feels like it moves in a similar direction. I agree with PayneDrive that each team will use FIRST to accomplish its own goals, but as FRC evolves, the range of options of what FRC CAN be used for changes as well.

Is it realistic for a team that wants students to primarily struggle through their own designs (as opposed to doing a lot of analysis of existing designs) to use FRC as a platform?

No team (or company) is an island, and together, discussions like this help us to better reflect on how we WANT to evolve as a STEM-inspiring program, instead of letting major changes happen without notice.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

Start with the charcoal forge...

Oh you thought you were kidding :yikes: should probably mention there are 4 generations of machinists and fabricators in my family.
I have hammers for nails time forgot that my relatives forged.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

In the best of humor....
In that case bio-engineering the tool bearer applies as prefabricated.
After all your hands and body are often the tools you use to do your work.

So are you implying someone is a tool :D ?

To be honest there's a difference between a raw material and a part or tool.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of my relatives used a stick to make a tool handle at all.
Seems a big waste of time today but for them they probably would have had it handy.
Working raw wood was actually something I was shown by my Dad as a kid - little did I know people would want tables that looked like that today I ruined me some nice rustic furniture in my youth.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Well, if it costs more than $400, no FRC team will be able to use it. If it costs less than $400.. well, that would be pretty amazing. So I think FRC will be fine.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

What if they give them away for free, but charge $400 for each of the plastic screws that break all the time?

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

because it's that hard to make/buy your own... :confused:

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

They are reverse pipe threaded, made of stainless steel, are split, bored down the middle and expand with a set screw down the bore and break once a match at the exact end :yikes:
If you substitute your own your warranty is also void.

Used to be a military contractor you'd be surprised the stunts I have seen.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I absolutely agree with this. As student design lead on a very low-resource team (we were reduced to cutting parts for our custom chassis with hacksaws after our only bandsaw broke earlier this build season) I find it very frustrating when we spend time coming up with the perfect design or cutting the perfect parts, only to find that a team with less engineering experience but more money can buy a kit and defeat us easily. I feel it goes against the spirit of FIRST for a team to be more competitive by not building the best robot they can, but buying one instead. Yes, this is the way many things work in the real world, but is it really what FIRST wants to encourage?

Obviously I cannot speak badly about all prefabricated parts and designs. The KOP chassis, prefab gearboxes, and easily available mechanum/omni wheels have always been a huge help to our low-resource team and we could not have built a robot without them. Ri3D teams, as well, are always an inspiration for both concept and specific designs. The difference, in my opinion, is that the KOP and Ri3D give you a basic level of functionality while encouraging teams to continue work to improve. The KOP chassis is, on its own, obviously not a viable design. Ri3D teams give great inspiration, but it is up to your team to fabricate the robot theirself. The MCC, on the other hand, is a functional, competitive robot that requires little-to-no engineering knowledge or design skills to create. The MCC does not even require you to read the robot rules. As a team member, I find it very demoralizing that we could perform better in competition by buying a kit and sleeping in than if we got up early to build our own.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

If you're sleeping in and using prefab parts, then you may not be using these purchased parts to their fullest potential. As i mentioned in my first post on this thread, my team uses lots of COTS and custom, but we don't sleep in.

Also, if you find it demoralizing that you think your team can build a better bot with mostly prefab parts as compared to original parts, then I recommend your team take the time and pull in the resources in the off-season to learn how to fabricate better than what can be bought. I understand that this will be a challenge, as you mention that you are a low resource team, but the other strategic planning that FRC teams face is in fundraising, sponsorships, and grants, not just a game. Do you happen to have any nearby teams that can help you make parts or help the students learn how to do so?

In the mean time, while the resources are low get as much COTS as can be afforded, and build a great robot. A "great robot" doesn't have to be an extreme performance machine, but rather is a machine that can be a valuable alliance member. How can you use your current resources to be a valuable alliance member? I feel like that question is more important than thinking about how it's built over how it performs.

Great teams don't happen overnight, and it will be a process that can take quite a few seasons. My team never got a blue banner until season 13.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

No. You are suffering from a lack of imagination. Once you stop thinking like a current FRC participant, how to do what I described becomes obvious.

Jane Doe's Robot Emporium offers a design(s), and a bill(s) of materials. Each item in the BOM(s) sells for under $400, individually.

Any FRC team that wants to, buys the many items (each under $400) needed to acquire their favorite, complete BOM.

Once all of the items arrive, the resulting pile can be assembled into an excellent competition machine, plus control devices.

If FIRST forbids buying all of the items, any team that cares to, buys N minus M of the items. Where M is large enough to satisfy FIRST's rules. They do some trivial cutting, etc. to create the M items out of "raw" materials like extruded aluminum.

So long as on-the-field performance is the metric that dominates the thinking of many (How many? Most? Too many? Exactly the right number? Too few?) teams, I'm going to predict that this scenario will come to pass.

The question is "When?", not "Whether?".

As the number of teams grows, if the allure of the proverbial Blue Champion Banner isn't radically altered, the number of potential customers for an IKEA-style superbot also grows, and the "invisible hand" grows stronger.

Discuss.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Why don't you just take the COTS parts into account when designing? If you know what you can buy off the shelf don't you have a solid baseline for what standards you should be performing at? If you know a kit bot runs x ft/s and has y amount of pushing power, shouldn't you design above that? If you know they have an intake that is constrained to work in one way can't you use that against them?

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Someone entertained the same thought 11 years ago, and I still can't mail-order my Cheesy Poof Powder.

We are closer today (so many different choices of gearboxes, wheels, systems, and a few generic kits), but I think its an asymptotic curve. Besides, I don't think the market for game specific solutions is large (but I suppose only Mr. Market actually knows). While many teams use the concepts proved out by Ri3D & others, (I think) very few copy the drawings.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

While I haven't yet read this thread, I feel inclined to comment. We here at 696 too have noticed the proliferation of prefabricated parts and mechanisms in FIRST in the last few years. It certainly is a different FIRST than when I started in it 15 years ago. Nonetheless, we've invested quite heavily in CNC manufacturing software and equipment in the past 3 years. While our students are gaining awesome skills while making awesome parts, we've also noticed that it's increasingly becoming a losing battle to compete with some of these COTS parts. I can spend more than two weeks designing and manufacturing a gearbox that costs me maybe $150 and hopefully works like I designed it, or I can spend 10 minutes punching my credit cart into a website to get a roughly equivalent outcome (performance-wise) for $100 more.

While I'd like for us to make everything, like in the good ol days, it's not competitive for us to do so anymore. I mean shoot, we even used to make sprockets from bar stock. Now, every time we order a COTS part, it's not because we can't make it in-house, it's because we've elected to buy time. When you buy COTS parts, you are buying time, and that makes it a very attractive option. This year we've taken a little bit of a different approach of "if you can't beat em, join em" and I think you'll see it in our selection of COTS components on our robot.

That said though, there is still plenty of custom work to be done, and by using COTS components in some areas, we've been able to focus our efforts toward branching out into new manufacturing techniques such as CNC lathe and CNC plasma for other areas of the machine.

Also, learning how to source things from a catalog, configure a product with multiple options, and interpret manufacturer specifications and data sheets is a very useful skill for students to learn, but the offerings from FRC vendors are very FRC specific, and may not provide quite the same experience as working with more traditional industrial component manufacturers and vendors.

Finally, if you buy COTS, and do not do any real fabrication, you're essentially limiting yourself to what's available from the COTS vendors, and perhaps even to FIRST robotics as an activity. Our lab and program is set up in a way that while FIRST Robotics is a major component of what we do, it's not the only thing we could do. With our in house manufacturing capability, if FIRST were to become nonexistent tomorrow, we could overnight switch into building literally any other kind of project. And with how much we've spent on FIRST this year, we honestly could have taken the year off and bought and restored a 68 Firebird instead.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

I believe inspiration comes when you have a bit of success, and then keep trying to do better.

COTS parts can make it easier to get the initial bit of success, so that you desire to overcome challenges rather than just give up.
COTS parts do not necessarily remove the drive to do better, or to learn more so you can improve the pre-existing solutions.

I don't believe COTS parts are bad because I believe they make success, and therefore inspiration, accessible to more teams.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

Precisely. The only way to compete with the highly advanced COTS parts is to manufacture year round because that's exactly what the COTS part supply chain is doing.

Once you add the students learning into the equation it's no longer even a CNC fabrication problem. You need to teach them how to use the machine so now they need to go year round. That education alone on an advanced CNC machine could consume all of the 6 week build easily.

Sooner or later - the top teams that used to show exceptional levels of fabrication will no longer be able to avoid rampant COTS purchases unless they are a year round vocational school. This is already the case with the FRC control system. Even if you can fabricate that (Team 221 for example) you can't legally use it in the FRC competition.

We are on the same page. I had this exact revelation when Team 11 got their HAAS CNC mill and lathe. This again is why I am trying hard to setup a Makerspace. Simply put: we can't turn out the sort of fabrication I think people want us to turn out without committing to resource access year round such that when the build starts the students are basically already trained operators with a task. I can see how other manufacturing heavy places can manage this - they can bring the students to their workplaces and bootstrap them off that apprenticeship any time during the year. Let's be fair: NJ as a State is not known as the being a machine manufacturing powerhouse anymore (there are some exceptions but not enough). So if we can't introduce the skills as a byproduct of the local industry then we can serve the interest by merely providing access and letting curiosity do the rest.

In the end, however, I see the inevitable coming. Adults and business people squeezing the competition until there are more consumers and less fabricators. FIRST FRC just needs to adapt if they are not okay with it and personally I don't think we should be entirely okay with all that means. My only solace in all this is that if this is allowed to run unchecked my personal goal to mentor and help my community is unaffected because I don't care if we win the competition personally (I know some people even on my team will not agree with this, that's fine). I don't have to rely on Team 11/193 to fund my Makerspace concept. I now own 3 FRC robots personally: 2 AM14U2 chassis and a custom one. I have my own small and portable CNC tools I can offer. When the students come looking with the necessary curiosity the resources are there cause for me that's what this is about. I don't care who wins FRC: I care that my students can achieve unhindered by obstacles put in place with the very same consumerism that created FRC in the first place when we drove manufacturing offshore exploiting underpaid labor. I have been around FRC for 20 years so I remember the ideals when it was U.S. FIRST. I am glad we became global but global is still a village of villages. This is my village, they got me where I am, now I owe them some favors in return even if some people don't get it or even understand it.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

What are people afraid of here, really? That we have teams buying their way to a competitive robot? Really? This is the problem with FIRST that keeps you up at night?

Specialized COTS parts enable better robots? Indisputable. That they lesson the FIRST experience for most (or even many) teams? I see no evidence of this.

AND I see the opposite actually.

Specialized COTS parts allow things that are just not possible for the vast majority of teams for pretty much any team that can fund raise a few hundred extra bucks. Is that really that bad of a thing? If I am a lower middle of the road team and I want to have shifting transmissions next year what are my options? I can spend a ton of time and energy trying to design my own (and probably failing) or I can order a tried and true solution from AndyMark or VexPro or others. I just don't see this as a problem.

/begin old man rant/
FIRST has always been one where a team could effectively buy a competitive robot if that was their goal. With enough dough, a team could effectively have a professionally designed and build robot that their kids had almost no input into designing & building.

On the Continuum of Inspiration, I suppose this is too far to one side. Just as I think that letting kids spend 1000's of hours on an arm only to watch it spin in circles all match because FIRST gave them a horrible hack for a drive system (e.g. a drill a trantorque where a chuck should be) is too far to the other.

I seriously doubt that we will ever get to the point where you can order a competitive robot in a kit but we can cross that bridge when we get to it. I still see way too many teams struggling to get a robot to play the game at all to lose any sleep over this dystopian FIRST vision.

Also... ...GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
/end old man rant/

Dr. Joe J.

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

LOL!

Re: Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts
 

90%+ of all the people responding are agreeing with each other. It goes back to what I said 7 pages ago. Different strokes for different folks. It's all about the evolution of the individual team and how far mentors can/want to take them.

The majority of our kids on my team are in an engineering academy with access to CNC mills and lathes. They have a few 3D printers to play with and a plasma cutter. The juniors and seniors have the experience and background to make our needed parts. Their experience will be different than other teams.

Then I remember the students I have met at competition who are from some big city schools. Their mentors have different priorities. Their goals include keeping the kids off the streets, keeping them fed. Keeping them away from the gangs. They don't have the facilities that I have access to. Sadly, they do not have the financial resources either. Do I have a problem with them using more COTS than us? Nope. Are they doing it right? Yup. Are we doing it right? Yup. Are all of you doing it correctly? Yup.

We're all doing what we think are best for our students. Some are ready for higher level goals and sophisticated challenges. Others will see success by the simple things like learning ohms law or how to wire without frying anything. Take 'em as far as you can and keep 'em excited about learning. Then we are all winners. It's really not about what happens on the field. It's about the journey getting to the field.