Quote:
Originally Posted by 11douglash
Banebots is likely to give the same motors... The kit motors don't change frequently, just look at the FP's. So i think the banebots motors will stay. My team's been around for a while, so we have 10+ banebots gearboxes of various ratios.
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You've conveniently provided me with a perfect opportunity to comment on a common misconception. The kit motors change almost every year. They may look the same, they may even be called the same thing (roughly speaking),
but they're not.
I can recall at least nine different Fisher-Price motors provided in the FRC KOP over the last 13 years. (A surprisingly long time....) Eight of those types looked almost identical (because they were RS-550 can motors). They range in power from around 140 W to around 400 W—so there are serious concerns about equivalence, and therefore FIRST rarely allows substitutions. That's why I alluded to the manufacturer's spec sheet above—it's the simplest way to know exactly what you're getting.
Similarly, BaneBots has made the mistake in the past of selling motors without changing the information on the website to reflect that they were no longer supplying the ones from the KOP. Normally,
caveat emptor might apply—but this was a FIRST supplier, who surely should have known that FIRST teams were relying on the accuracy of their website to buy spares of the motors that they'd supplied. (If they didn't know, FIRST screwed up in not making this clear to them; if they did know, they have no excuse.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by 11douglash
I think that the easiest way out of this is to stock up on a few common gearboxes. 64:1, 24:1 for the middle power motors (RS-550, 540, if i remember correctly) seem to be commonly used. I think that while we can complain all day, the most sucsessful solution would be to buy a few, and trade with other teams if nessisary.
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As I mentioned above, this is a bad idea. Legal motors change.
But more than that, by buying gearboxes, you're investing in inventory. That cost is now sunk into what's effectively a capital asset, which you can't easily liquidate when you want to use it for some other productive purpose. That forces you to go to the great inconvenience of setting up a market for these gearboxes after the fact—a market in which delivery time might be improved, but sufficient supply is very uncertain. Bad as BaneBots order fulfillment history is with these gearboxes, I find it hard to believe that this will be much better, especially given the possibility of uneven demand for certain gearboxes.