The thing about the real world is that there usually ARE hard limits on what you can spend to develop things.....and so why should that be different here?
In fact, this really ISN'T a limit on development costs is it....people can still go off and make tons of protos, and perhaps lots of tooling if they wanted.....no? (isn't the cost of parts just material and labor....all the NRE is left out)
Besides, in general, the winner in business isn't always the one with the "best" (highest performaing) design....there are all sorts of other issues, like time to market, development and MFG costs, etc....
No matter what we say or do, you have to admit that FIRST is a concocted enterprise. No where in business would you end up with 800 competitors for so many years....and continue to have that number GROWING!
If this were business, the best would surface, and the rest would go under.....but that's not what FIRST wants.....so there has to be some sort of "leveling" in order to keep EVERYONE in it.
Besides.....why not try and make some of your enhancements this year with electronics and software? There are plenty of opportunities for this with the custom circuit...and all of that will be very cheap by comparison. (bang for the buck....perhaps the biggest engineering challange, especially in an economy like this!)
-Quentin
Quote:
Originally posted by Brett W
I am a little upset to read that your gearbox couldn't be made with $3500. We make our gear boxes for free. use gears and material from stuff we find at our school then machine it. i can understand if you don't have a machine shop in your school and you have too pay labour; but going to FIVE machine shops that just is not right. you are claiming that you are leveling the playing field. I don't think so you are making it worse by having such a perfect robot while there are still teams with almost nothing. What exactly are you being inspired by or recognizing. (For INSPIRATION and RECOGNITION of Science and Technology) You are just paying a machine shop to build your robot for you. I can't see how some one would learn from this. These kits this year were designed for teams with no machine shop. so there is no need to go to 5 maching shops to get your robot built.
Just My Two cents.
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