[budly99]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

My standard advice:

Stop whining about something that can be fixed by working harder.

Teams that have the resources to do lots of prototyping, design their entire robots in CAD, send the parts to machine shop sponsors, and assemble completed robots are the way they are because of a lot of hard work. These resources and relationships did not just fall in their laps. These teams provide their students a very engaging and rewarding opportunity to work with engineers and companies, to participate in an advanced engineering design process, thoroughly ideate and test prototype ideas, understand topics like manufacturability and limitations of various fabrication technologies, see how using CAD software significantly improves the final robot, and much, much more.

Instead of whining about these teams, recruit engineering mentors. Recruit machine shop sponsors. Fundraiser throughout the year to afford lots of prototyping. Learn and become fluent in CAD software. With enough hard work, any team can become a top tier team.

How do I know this is possible? When I first joined 228, we had about eight students and an annual budget of about $12k. Last year, our budget was probably among the top quarter percentile of FRC teams, we had identical practice and competition robots with parts made at our school, at two sponsor machine shops in Connecticut, and at one sponsor machine shop in California. We attended three official events and took home a Regional banner and Regional Engineering Inspiration award. We bucked the traditional advice against never designing a swerve for the first time during the build season, and did just that (and even made it able to drive over the bump), and other than a bearing defect issue (out of our control) got it working within the six weeks build. And we worked our collective buts off for the entire year, both inside and out of the six week build, to fundraise and get the resources in place to make all that possible. Our goal has never been to whine about the top tier teams, but to become one.

Kudos to all the teams that can accomplish this. I was responding to the post about an illegal robot getting an award, and the poster wondering how it can happen. My point is I believe there is a bit of a contradiction between the mission of FIRST and the way awards are won.