Re: Innovation First- What gives?
 

How about a breather? Let's give it 24 hours and then come back to it.

EDIT: Ok, it's open again, go nuts.

Re: Innovation First- What gives?
 

OK Jess, since you offered... :)
How about letting everyone on Chief Delphi decide that the actual contract between FIRST and IFI is none of their business? We are customers of FIRST. As such we can expect, and deserve, quality service and a quality product. When we don't get either, we can - and should - make our displeasure known in a reasonable and professional manner. However, just because we don't like something that the organization is doing does not mean that we, as customers, automatically get to peruse through the internal business documents of the organization. Asking to do so is inappropriate, just as asking about the salary of a particular FIRST engineering intern would be.

Earlier Cody made an analogy between FIRST and a bus company. As he noted, if the bus provides a good service and gets you where you are going, as a customer you appreciate the service. But if it breaks down one day and you are late to work as a result, you are justified in being disappointed because you have paid for, and expect, a certain minimum level of service. To extend the analogy, in such a case you are free to comment on the (lack of) service, and even write a letter of complaint to the owner of the bus company. But just because you aren't happy with the bus company does not mean that you get to look at the internal contracts between the bus company and their providers. Their internal business papers are their business and not yours. Whether they have "something to hide" or not is irrelevant and a specious argument.

If a significant chunk of my registration fee went to pay IFI (it doesn't) then - based on the quantity and quality of the service that they provide to FIRST and the community of teams - it would not bother me. At least, it would not bother me nearly as much as knowing that a significant chunk of my registration fee went to pay a certain unqualified vendor for the previous three years disastrous scoring systems. But that aside, the reality is that the largest chunk of the registration fees goes toward paying for FIRST operations and the functions provided by the capable people in Manchester. And for the services that they provide to the teams and the FIRST community, I do not begrudge them that portion of my registration fees (and none of this is secret information - all you have to do is look it up in the annual FIRST financial report).

We get a new OI and RC each year because the teams insisted on it. Back in the day when FIRST owned all the control systems and teams had to return them to FIRST at the conclusion of each competition season, teams complained bitterly about not being able to keep the control systems. There were endless requests to be able to keep the control systems that they needed to be able to demonstrate their robots and use them during the off-season. When the new IFI controllers became available, FIRST sought out a lot of feedback from the teams on this topic. In response to the teams' request, FIRST adjusted the price of the registration fee specifically to account for the teams' purchase of the RC and OI so they could keep the old ones and get new ones every year. So let's just drop the whole concept of this being some FIRST-IFI plot to screw the teams for more money. It isn't, and to imply so is just inane.

-dave

Re: Innovation First- What gives?
 

Dave,
I always appreciate your input and trust that (aside from the cutting humor) you speak the truth from a first hand point of view. So, thanks for speaking up on this. This subject seems to pop up in one form or another every year. Maybe this time it is finally put to bed permanently.


Now as for speaking from a first hand point of view.....Care to elaborate on the above comment?;)

Re: Innovation First- What gives?
 

I've seen alot of talk about how much the kit costs "in the real world" compared to how much FIRST teams pay. I advise you to take this with a grain of salt. Keep in mind that liquid assets (cash) are not always equal to real assets (the business as a whole).

The world revolves around incentives. If there was no incentive for someone to do something, they simply wouldn't do it. Our official suppliers were given the incentive from FIRST to trade some cash now for a huge pool of graduating engineers in the near future. Money is relatively easy to come by; there will always be people to sell products to. The real value is in the people who make the products. A quality team of motivated engineers are worth their weight in gold to big technology companies. If given the choice between a little bit of cash now or an abundance of quality prospective employees later, I'm will to bet almost every company you asked would take the latter.

Also, how cares how much IFI gets from their contract with FIRST? Leave the conspiracy theories to the guys outside the fence at Area 51. The bottom line is while registration costs roughly the same every year, the quality of the kit and the event becomes progressively better. No matter how much cash IFI gets (or loses) from supporting FIRST, every student is still given the same great experience. $6,000 for an entire team (which may I remind you IS NOT just made up students. Parents and mentors love this stuff, too!) is CHEAP for what we're getting. You can't this kind of deal anywhere else. :)

Re: Innovation First- What gives?
 

Many people have always had a problem with the price of the FIRST Robotics Competition, but I can assure you the price of it results in no way from secret price gouging, IFI, or any other loony conspiracy theory. The high price of the competition has led to the creation of lower cost alternatives by FIRST (such as the FIRST Vex Challenge) and other organizations (such as BEST). If by some inane reason you feel that FIRST and/or IFI is ripping you off, I recommend you investigate another competition that may better suit your price range.
Some items from IFI or other suppliers you may find that you actually could make from raw material at a lower cost (provided you have the experience, equipment, time, and resources to do so), but you must factor in the both the labor costs, effort, and time you save by ordering from these suppliers. Also, as previously mentioned, you have to consider the very small niche market these suppliers are providing to. Most of these items have very little use outside the realm of large scale competition robotics (which, especially after the decline in popularity of combat robotics, are few and far between), and these companies get very little business outside of FIRST.

Re: Innovation First- What gives?
 

Anyone who has had to use the Hatch scoring systems software can tell you it was an absolute nightmare to use. Especially for the off-season software, obnoxious popup windows, lack of status icons to tell you that the program was running or that a task had been completed successfully, and buggy scoring/ranking problems made it so, at least for our off-season competition, I was constantly backing up the rankings in Excel and ultimately ran the alliances and finals in Excel instead of the software.

Re: Innovation First- What gives?
 

I honestly think that the problem stems from the fact that no one really understands how expensive these tools are in the real life. I just discovered that the programmer/emulator to the Texas Instruments DSP (Think PIC only more powerful) that Im working with is more expensive than what most rookie teams spend on their robot. The development board Im working with costs just as much the OI alone and while it's more powerful than the OI it's still is an amazing price for a device that just gives me easy access to the physical pins and USB programming. Im sure that someone else is going to point out the fact that the board Im using is more powerful hence it's more expensive but the PIC development boards I've seen fall into the category of slighly less expensive than the OI. That board was only designed to do one thing which is run motors. Im sure the largest expense people forget is the cost in actually developing these types of devices. This has to be one of most interesting aspects of electrical engineering. Unfortunatly, it's also one of the experiences that FIRST can't provide.

Re: Innovation First- What gives?
 

Concerning all of this discussion about costs, I haven't seen anyone mention economies of scale. Building a handful of devices will be a lot more expensive than knowing 1500 or so are sure-sales.

I'm sure this number would come down (including labor) considerably if they were to gear up for quanity production. Probably not down to 330$ (design variables notwithstanding), but as you can see, the potential savings are huge.

The consideration here is that this applies in other areas of the organization as well. This is not to necessairly comment one way or the other on the IFI pricing/cost structure, but to be something to keep in mind when trying to distill the numbers.