Quote:
Originally Posted by Nuttyman54
This is the primary problem I see right now. Not only are teams not getting anywhere close to the same value from FIRST Choice, some of the components are used on robots (talons, CIMs, etc) and some aren't (graphics cards, drills, wire strippers). This boils down to huge differences in team expenses for the season (real money dollars), AND large discrepancies in cost accounting for the robot budget limit.
Hopefully the cost accounting rules help remedy this in some way to make it more fair. I don't think it's right that a team that was able to get in and get 11 talons ($660 worth of robot parts) and puts them all on the robot would get all of those speed controllers counted as KOP costs and not towards the $3500 limit*, whereas a team which was only able to get graphics cards and wire strippers spends their own money on the same 11 speed controllers, and has to count that against the $3500 cap because it wasn't part of their "KOP", but non-robot items were.
IMO, the purpose of the kit of parts is to give teams a fair and solid foundation to start building their robots. The current setup does not do that. I have seen several good ideas for how to remedy the problem in the future, but if parts have already shipped, there is little that can be done to remedy the current situation.
I would like to see an improved FIRST Choice setup for the post-kickoff round, with re-stocked high demand components like motors and speed controllers. I would also like to see the robot cost rules account for teams who had to purchase critical items like Talons without FIRST Choice credits due to system overloads. It's only fair.
*This is based on previous year's rules for cost accounting
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The easy fix for this is to make everything on the BoM count towards the budget at the fair market value (Talons = $60 and cRIO = $525 etc). So no logger will the KoP pieces be considered "freebies" interms of the budget contraint on teams. If this was to happen I think it would be in the best interest of Teams and FIRST to increase the budget limit to something more reasonable then $3,500.
Also I think this will be good to give team, especially the students, a more accurate idea of what a FIRST Robot cost. This cost is still missing the labor of assembly and fabrication.
-Clinton-