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Speed is about 13fps with 4in wheels. http://www.facebook.com/WARobotics

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Looking good Marcus. Good luck to you guys this year.

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Thanks Akash. How is your new team doing?

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Good to see our designs spread around to newer teams.

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The design is mine. All that may be similar to your teams designs are the gears which I bought from RC.

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Isn't your drive the same as RC's as well? Looks awefuly similar. Either way looks nice and definitely stick to aluminum on the trans plates. Stiffness is pretty critical for that.

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I believe Marcus uses a single speed and some sort of westcoast. According to his teams facebook, their drive is different from ours.

But I'm glad those gears are working out great for you ;)

-RC

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Yes, my design is inspired by Teams like 1323, 973, 254, and 60. No matter what you do, most west coast drives are going to look similar if not exactly the same. My transmissions are single speed and yours are two speed if I am not mistaken.

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We compared these plates to our CAD from the pre-season, the pocketing and all features and shapes are an identical match, even the trivial details.

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So... does "RC from team 1323" qualify as a legal vendor for the 2011 season per the FRC rules?

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Most of my design was heavily inspired by your designs. I took some pictures at SVR last year and looked upon those for inspiration. You shouldn't be mad that I "stole" your design, but you should be happy that you taught me something about designing transmissions and were able to spread your knowledge without even knowing it.

John, RC was not planning to sell anything this season nor will he as posted below.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/36370

I was wrong to advertise, he was making aluminum gears for himself and I bugged him to make some for us.

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In general, no one in FIRST gets angry when someone "steals" a design, but they like it a LOT more when they get credit. You said "this is 100% our design" which is true, but a better statement would have been "we designed this heavily inspired by _____".

As far as selling gears...
It sounds to me more like RC did you a favor and his team/machine shop/whatever is sponsoring your team by donating some machining as a favor. You just paid for raw stock and some annodizing (which is what you'll account for in your Robot BOM). Manufacturing sharing is a great collaborative part of FIRST. THAT would be legal...

Be clear. There are big differences in the nuances here. Saying it one way will make you friends, saying it another raises eyebrows. Your design was inspired heavily by others, and you got some gears machined by a friend... right?

-John

PS - The transmissions look great :)

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Thank you John for that clarification. I did state that my design was inspired by a few different teams, but not in the description of the photo as I should have. And I know what you mean by the way you say things. I should have stated all of that in the start of the thread.


And thanks, they look pretty good on our bot.

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My qualm is with the fact that this was clearly done with our CAD file, or it's a pretty implausible coincidence (the gearboxes we had at SVR last year had different pocketing than this), and I had no knowledge of it.

I'm not mad someone "stole" our design, but this is just too darn close for me to believe it's from pictures.

If you want me to drop this point, send me the model to compare.

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That was my point....these look identical to your stuff which I have seen plenty of. Im all for sharing design / manufacturing / whatever...hell we do it too but give credit where credit is due