Re: COTS: How far should it go?
 

The purpose of cots parts for us is to reduce the amount of work during build season dealing with details of gearbox design and getting into strategic design and systems. We did all the designing gearboxes from scratch stuff in the off season so the CAD team could get the knowledge they needed to effectively design rotary driven mechanisms. Now they are learning how to add them in to a greater machine as a whole.

We have access to 3 different CNC milling and turning ops, a water jet and a sheet metal fabricator and we still by cots. Why? Time. Wasting design time and incurring more delay in getting things back from sponsors make no since. Why do I need to design a custom spur gear box when VEX makes a planetary one that's smaller, cheaper, and will get to me sooner? Sure we could but we spend the time on system design, optimization, and testing side of things while your students are the most motivated.

I would rather leverage machining resources and students brains on the parts that connect the cots parts together.

Re: COTS: How far should it go?
 

This thread has a nice mix of the both serious and reductio ad absurdum arguments, so I'll chime in.

FIRST should allow teams that wish to provide their own aluminum to mine and smelt it in the off season. (Teams that want to use their own wood will have to plan further ahead)

I agree with those who say each team should make the decisions about what is best for their goals. I think (hope) those teams with CNC access still train their students in the use of hand and power tools. The emphasis will differ; generating CNC files from CAD are an important part of their design cycle that is completely absent from teams whose resources don't include CNC. Any team with limited resources, be it number of students, money, machine tools, whatever, should still be trying to get the most for the students out of this program.
Say a very small team wants to participate: If the best way for that particular team is to buy a completely running, programmed robot, and focus on completely understanding how it was put together, or to build a single mechanism from scratch and put that on the COTS robot would that be wrong? If a team with a huge budget, full time mentors, and a hundred students does it, it may still be justifiable. I would be interested in seeing the justification, but if they are confident they are maximizing the student's experience for the time and money spent, and are functioning with the structure of FIRST's rules, should I really be critical?

What is available as COTS for FIRST will continue to grow as the success of FIRST makes designing specifically for us economically viable. This is the real engineering world. Your competitive advantage this week is a $20 COTS part next week. Teaching the kids to make educated decisions about risk/reward and buy/build is not a bad thing.

Oh, and as the programming mentor I naturally voted for everything! It would be fantastic to have the students programming a completely working robot the first week. I hope no one puts up a poll on whether only assembly language should be allowed, or if high level languages and wpilib is still OK. :)