Creating and selling parts.
 

(DISCLAIMER: This is from my own mind, and is not endorsed by any team or FIRST or whatever.)

I was just trying to think of a fundraising thing, and it hit me.

Suppose team pi realized that they make a mean competition port dongle. Suppose further that they need to raise some money to get registered and such. Would making a few dozen/hundred/gajillion dongles and then selling them be a good thing or a bad thing for FIRST? FIRST teams?

(Friendly reminder: There are people outside of FIRST who use IFI systems like ours. Robot combat, largely, but I imagine other fields use it as well.)

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Maybe a dongle is a bad example. It isn't much more than a straight wire (to enable channel select) and two wires with switches (for autonomous and kill). If teams merely look at the pinout guide, they can make their own very, very easily indeed. (For channel select only, a paperclip is good.)

And of course, IFI could change the specification, leaving you with several (several "gajillion"?) useless parts.

Are you thinking more along the lines of Andy Baker's standardized gearboxes, in terms of a final plan?

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I didn't even know A-money was standardizing gearboxes. But for the sake of argument, yeah.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I had a the same idea for a fundraiser ,I was thinking of a 2 speed tranny kit that would consist of a gears, bearing,shafts,instuctuction,software and a real sweet cnc housing to mount everything into.I thought it could designed with the abilty to have different motor configurations (ie. one drill ,drill and chip or just the chip maybe even the tyco with another motor) I thought this could be a great teaching tool and alot of fun to assemble.This tranny should also have a good encoder also built into it monitor the output shaft.And the software should include manual shift or full auto shift. I think if someone sell 200 unit the price would not be that much maybe $150 a set .

jim schaddelee
team 107 mentor

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I would be willing to pay for a well made dongle (ie, better then I can make myself).

696 sells 25' serial cables for about the same price as I could get from the distributor we use at work (and much better then at your standard computer store). I've bought from them to help support their team.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Dongles would be a great fundraiser but before you put your effort into building dongles to do as a fundraiser, i know of a couple groups that are working on mass producing dongles as a handout. Just a little heads up...

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Rage is looking into something similar, only we are thinking about doing aluminum sprockets with our new cnc machine. If anyone has any feedback on this idea and would be interested in seeing something like this happen please PM me.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I personally think it's a great thing to do in general. It can save time for teams (especially rookies) who don't really know what to do for something. I know many teams don't have the best of dongles... and I know other ideas were like trannys and sprockets and such... and I mean, many teams don't have the facilities/amount of people to do things like transmissions. If another team has a good thing to sell... I think it's great cause it's win-win, the team recieving gets something they may not be able to do themselves as well and has another team or teams to talk to if something breaks for support, and the team creating it of course gets the funding. Both teams also become close and form a network from the transaction, and cooperating is what FIRST is all about. Working with another team like that can only help make relationships between those teams better.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I think that this is a GREAT idea. You're building something that is useful for other teams while doing some fundraising. Students are hopefully using and building skills. There's a few concerns that I should note:

Quality Assurance: Would you completely trust an integral drivetrain component out of a box build by another team as opposed to a company?

Longevity: Teams could ruin thier reputation by providing seemingly functional components that don't hold up over the course of a season.

Those are the two ideas that popped into my head immediately. I think you'd have to approach this idea with caution. However, if you wanted to manufacturing some 80/20 like brackets... that's an undertapped market.

All done.

Matt

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I cant agree with you more, but maybe this could be a project to teach kids how a company takes products to market. they could do market research ,quality planning,testing and a marketing plan. This would take alot of work. A tranny might be a multi team project.

jim chaddelee
team 107 mentor

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I love this question - let me open it up a little more for the big philisophical debate...I see 3 questions here.

1) At what point does the fund raiser part exceed gracious professionalism? Recall the big cheezy-poofs / Kingman collaberation debate last year - people weighed in on both sides. I posted in favor of it and it appears FIRST embraced it, so I think we'll see much more of teams working together to share the load. But when we're talking about selling rather than giving does that change the attitude? If our team has excess resources and I choose to sell them rather than donate or exchange them, does that make me a bad guy? Is it different for little team alpha who doesn't have excess resources and is using the funds to break even, versus big team beta who is fully funded and supported and is selling it to buy nicer team jackets?

2) Why is hardware treated differently than intellectual property? We see white papers all the time with detail drawings of tranny's, autonomous code, etc. - but what if team delta (or team engineer Joe Delta) said "we'll sell our tranny design for $100"? Are we expected to share designs for free since there's no intrinsic expense? If we're promoting engineering, why are we expected to give our product (the design) away as if it had no value?

3) What's wrong with individuals/companies selling stuff for a profit, not just as a fund raiser? That's how Innovation First started, sounds like Andy Baker is working towards it on gearboxes, if the market supports it, why not?

I'll answer my own questions later on, but what do you think?

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

1) I don't think it changes the attitude...to a point. If your team exerted labor in the production of something, then go ahead and ask for some cash, maybe even a few bucks over cost. If it's something your team bought, whatever it cost the team. Kit parts, I'd say, oughta go for shipping-ish. It all comes down to whatever the two teams hash out, but that seems like a vague guideline.

2) I guess this is one of the points where FIRST differs with reality. We've got this everyone-wants-to-help-everyone scenario in FIRST, which isn't exactly what you've got going in the real world. The designs have value, it's just that everyone thus far seems to have given them away. If someone were to ask a few bucks for a white paper, you'd be looked at funny (only because it's not as expected in FIRST), and you might not have much success, but that's your right. (Just thinking out loud, perhaps teams should put in a thing such as "This document is free to FIRST teams, but may not be used outside of FIRST without the author's permission.")

3) Well, fundraisers tend to be for profit anyway--the profits just benefit teams. But if it's your design, and you think you can sell it to folks and make that money, go for it. I don't think anyone's going to fault your team for trying to make an honest dollar.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I see a potential problem with this. If enough teams started to sell enough different parts, FIRST could basically become who can buy the best parts type of thing. If a certain team had the money, they could buy team a's frame, team b's tranny, team c's arm, ect. and end up all they do is a few modifications to the frame to fit the parts, and bolting them together. There's a difference between manufacturing parts a team cant make as a mentor, and buying parts. Plus, the fundraiser would be hard anyway, if the other team wanted to actually use them in the competition, sense all their parts have to be made during the build season, they fundraising team would have to basically become an assembly line to make any profit.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

You've hit the big thing--building the bigger parts of the robot in a six-week timespan is hard to impossible. Therefore, it can't really get that big, unless a team decides not to build a robot that year. And no team is going to do that.

However, things like the OI remain unregulated by and large. So if a team wanted to build good strong control boards for the OI with plenty of expandability (such as adding switches), then we're getting somewhere.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

What's wrong with this? What if there is a new team which has very little knowledge, 1 or 2 mentors, and a very small budget? I would have no problem letting a team assemble their robot from parts that other teams sold, I see this as a win-win situation. Isn't this why FIRST stopped being so detailed on what parts we can use? Once the team becomes more advanced, they would most likely begin to create their own parts.

Help me here... maybe I have read this wrong... But if your team is "acting" like a "company" in the you send us $$$ and we send you a part, why wouldn't the "team" (aka company) be able to take orders and mass produce the parts before the season started? Then on the Saturday the season starts, take the boxes of parts to UPS and ship them all out.

Then the team has a couple of options, "buy" one of their own parts that was previously made (though that could get dicey) or just make another one with all the experience they have.

Yes? No?

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

To be honest, I think that you -COULD- do that. However, it would be on such thin ice that I doubt you'd fare well.

Plus, if reading older posts has taught me anything, there are loops thrown each year. Added motors, subtracted motors, deleted motors, new motors...y'knahmsayin?

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

True, but can you think of what would happen to robotics if this all happened. There would be a couple teams who would mass produce certain parts they were good at. Say 112234 has amazing transmissions and 998876 is the pneumatics expert. Just pull out your catalog, and order your robot. People would no longer learn anything from robotics. Anyone can order parts from a catalog, but it's a different experiance when you have to design the parts and follow through by building them. You also will create 2 classes of FIRST teams. The ones who buy the best of everything, and become the dominant/winning teams, and the ones who actually bother to make theirs themselves. I sure hope FIRST never becomes nothing more than ordering parts through a catalog and assembling them.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

We were thinking of making sprockets, unfortunatly the work came tiresum. We made them for a few teams and our own and that was work enough.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Well, there is one little thing. In racing, speed is measured in cubic dollars. In FIRST, success is measured in cubic skill. It's been said--your robot can be amazing, but you'll do nothing if you don't know how to drive it. Plus what will you do when something breaks? I'll bet that if this became the norm, some team would get too "soft" and realize this exact problem all too late. At that point, it'd come down to either ghettofab or hoping some other team at the regional runs that system.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Though I'm pretty confident creating and selling parts would never reach such a level, it would have interesting repercussions. If there was a large inter-team trade, teams would not be economically independent as they are (mostly) now. Except for teams in the same location that might compete for sponsors, how much money other teams make has no effect on any other team. Inter-team trade would create a situation much more like a real economy. If teams really wanted to stay competitive, they would try to keep exports greater than imports, not sell to particular teams, etc etc. Like I said before, it will never reach such a level, but it just got me thinking...

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

if this selling/buying business really builds up, maybe a rule about no selling or buying from the day of kickoff till the end of the season. in the offseason, perhaps having a more experienced team can sell to ones which may need the product.. to use as an example. so maybe another rule about not allowing the direct use of a bought item. a replica may be allowed because creating a replica will definitly teach much about the system they had bought.. reverse-engineering if there are no plans or whatnot... so wait.. i think my grammer's going sumwhere. gahhh.. im gonna go sleep. hope what i wrote makes sense. if it doesnt, ill clear up tomorrow.. i think,

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I think this is a great concept, but I see one problem...where do we draw the line of what a team can buy? If a team can buy a sprocket, why not a gearbox, if they can buy a gearbox, than why not a drivetrain, chassis, arm, modular appendages, heck...why not a whole robot. In my opinion, one of the greatest parts of FIRST is seeing how all of the different teams tackled the same problem in different ways. If there is one "easy, and proven, premade part", then most teams will use it, and part of that initial challenge will be take away. So, yeah...before teams start jumping on this, I think that some regulations would need to be put in place as to what exactly a team can buy, so that we dont have teams mass producing subsystems and selling them to everyone. Of course everyone would want a 2004 Technokat arm, and a Wildstang swerve drive but how fun would that be to watch if all of the robots had them? Not very.

Just my $.02

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Alright, for the fairness thing, lemme take it back to a sort of competition I was deep into long before I even heard of FIRST: The Pokémon TCG.

Back in the days of Base, Jungle, all those rather wimpy expansions, and Genesis, there were generally a few decks that kept showing up. Haymakers, Chansey-Alakazam stall decks...and the occasional Mulligan Mewtwo. And while these would keep slugging it out, you'd have the odd kid now and then who would come out with an odd experiment of a deck that nobody had tried. And he'd mop the floor with all of them.

Or consider a cold virus. Everyone's expecting another form of it, but it's that one form that shows up that screws everyone up.

The point? As time goes by, many teams are going to stick to the more proven parts of FIRST. I fully expect to see quite a few teams next year using 33-style transmissions, in whole or in half. I'll bet money that I'll see lots of teams bundling up their LEDs into one little box, 1293 style. Shoot, I'll even bet that a damaged field element will wind up on the head of anyone who can get their mitts on one, Billfred-in-Atlanta style.

However, it's those little tweaks, those little spins that people put on their robots that make them stand out, that will always win the day in FIRST. I've seen my fair share of ball-suckers, grab-as-they-droppers, floor hangers (cough)spam(cough)...while they share common things, they all have their own little tweak that made them more or less effective. Eventually, the "less effective" tweaks will settle to the bottom, and the more effective ones will be assimilated by the group. Then someone will tweak the tweak. That's when the fun begins.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I had the same idea though it at no point was I ever considering doing it as a fundraiser. I have a bunch of schematics that would be amazing and unique sensors. Unfortunately their complexity makes it nearly impossible to use anything but a PCB board. Ive done some research and PCB's are usually cheaper it bulk. Thus it would make much more sense to contact as many teams as possible and ask them if they would like to buy one.Ummm... it sort of has and it can quite literally make the design process ten times easier. I know Chiefdelphi did that this year. They just ended up ordering differnt drill transmissions from a catalog. I don't see anything wrong with it though.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Now there's an angle I hadn't thought about. The rules have always been you can't build anything until day 1, but if you bought something available as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) that's OK (Bosch made their COTS drill transmissions long before day 1 for sure, so did Martin gears, etc.). If a team or individual associated with FIRST makes a component or assembly available for sale to any team, is it considered COTS or do they have to wait until build day 1 to fabricate and assemble them? What's to prevent a team or individual from building a new transmission in the fall and then deciding to sell it to anyone who wants one so they can use it? - they've effectively gotten a jump on the build season.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

I guess my feeling on this is, what is the difference between buying something from company xyz for your robot, and buying something from team 000? The only difference is that you support another team instead of some big company. And why would a team have to buy it from themselves when they can just produce it. I see no issue there, I mean they could stockpile the product but what is the difference the buying out of a company's stockpile in some wearhouse. And how would FIRST be able to regulate all of these things, it would become too much of a nightmare, and besides morals what is to stop teams from doing things like this as it is. And by having teams produce the product, it very well could be cheaper for smaller teams to buy from the team vs. a big company, and depending on scenario, the producing teams could offer discounts or freebies to teams in need, like RAGE did with teams 195, and 809. They needed parts and where strapped for cash and so we helped them out by donated the sprockets to them.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

What ever happened to the pride that comes with designing and building your OWN robot? If 2 or more teams develop a robot how can any of them say that their robot was the best? If you purchase parts from other teams then is it really YOUR robot?

The problem I see with this thread is that it seems to propogate laziness. If you buy all your prebuilt parts then what have you learned? The part that I like best about FIRST is the opportunity to explore, test and design a unique machine. i know that you need to buy gears or tread but to buy prebuilt gearboxes, arms frames etc? Where does the learning come in. I am a mentor but I am learning as we go along. I find that it taxes my mind. Makes me think. I build and find problems so I have to rebuild. Our team finds weaknesses and tries to figure a way around them. This is were you learn. This is were new inventions, better ideas and growth occur. I would hate to see any team lose out on these experiences. Steel becomes strong through fire. So do we. I for one would rather fail trying than win by someone elses work.

I know that I am in the minority on this thread but I needed to express my view.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Everyone has very valid veiws. I personally think a big part of the build challenge is finding certain pre-made parts, finding suppliers, and working with suppliers. Not everything in real engineering project is custom either. Some teams have better fabricators, others have better suppliers. I don't know if I have an opinion teams building and selling parts but if a team can buy something rather than build it, why not? Just remember, there will never be a pre-made part for every crazy idea that someone has while designing a FIRST robot or anything for that matter. The fun part of the process is decideing whether you spend time designing around something you can buy, or spend time building something custom. No of-the-shelf part is ever absolutely "perfect" for the application, that is why people fabricate. But some people decide to design around the constraints instead.

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

Sanddrag... so true!

I got a big reality check this summer when I started designing a lot of components from scratch for a project at work. I was stuck in the FIRST mode of building everything from scratch.

The more time I spend in industry, the more I realize that engineering consists a lot of taking imperfect products and modifying them to meet your application. I see a lot of teams (461 included!) that builds too many things from scratch.

When I was at IRI a couple weekends ago, I heard Dr. Joe talking to a few people about the gearboxes that 47 modified and used on their machine. His resounding theme was "Don't try to redo engineering work that's already been done that meets the needs of your application."

Second thought:

I see a lot of people posting concerns about the slippery slope of this idea. I think the fears are a bit far fetched.

Let's be realistic. Would a team ever try to design, market, manufacture and ship something so custom to a game as an arm in a 6 week build period? I can't see any team thinking, "We'll build everything else and then throw on the arm we bought from team 112 the last week."

A shifting gearbox? Sure.
A frame? 80-20 already does it.

An arm, ball scoop, stacker, hanger? No way, it's just too complicated, and not worth the the headaches to do a little fundraising. I mean, how much would you try to sell an arm for? We're talking probably thousands of dollars. With the $5,000 cap.. I don't see a lot of room for that.

Just my 2 cents,

Matt

Re: Creating and selling parts.
 

On the other hand, some teams have very similar arms from year to
year, and add different attachments. Two teams I can think of off the
top of my head are 60 (kingman) and 173 (rage). I think they've
figured out that practice time is more important then time spent
reengineering a whole new robot each time.

So, it becomes the same as the gear box. They build 20 arms, with easy
mounting hardware on each end, and sell them in the offseason. Then
when the 6 weeks start, you plop that arm on the base you've just
built with the gearbox from Andy, and build a ball grabber, or
innertube grabber, or whatever, put that on the other end of your arm,
practice for 3 weeks, and do very well.