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Unread 12-12-2013, 19:15
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DampRobot DampRobot is offline
Physics Major
AKA: Roger Romani
FRC #0100 (The Wildhats) and FRC#971 (Spartan Robotics)
Team Role: College Student
 
Join Date: Jan 2012
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: Stanford University
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Re: Vex Versachassis

Quote:
Originally Posted by rwkling1 View Post
I still have a question, is the system still a good buy when the gearboxes won't ship until the 15th of January? That's a week and a half after build season starts
I don't know about you, but that's pretty much exactly when I'm going to start ordering parts for my team.

One thing that I really like about the VersaChassis system is that you can build inventory and still maintain a lot of versatility. You can basically order parts for the drive, and decide while they're in the mail how you're going to configure your drive. Before, there were always some long lead AM, BB or SDPSI products that you needed to order early, and once you ordered them, you really couldn't change what type of drive you wanted. Now, you could probably change your drive multiple times per season, without reordering anything!

I'm also excited about the idea of being able to buy one of these systems and testing out manipulator prototypes on it really quickly. If you're in the one day shipping zone, you can buy most of these parts on kickoff day, then spend all of week one working with prototypes on an actual drive base (which very well could end up being your final one). A lot of the things people miss in prototyping are stuff like driver alignment or precision issues that suddenly becomes apparent when the mechanism is being driven around on a robot instead of by humans. Getting a DT really early could help with finding a lot of these types of errors early in prototyping, when you can still change it, rather when the actual robot comes together in week 6.
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