Quote:
Originally Posted by pwnageNick
I would say this is at the very high end of a VEX team budget, at least for a single team (single robot).
Even as a member of a VEXU team I couldn't imagine spending this much money on one robot.
-Nick
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Paul's old VEX team operates in a very high-end way
. Some of us on other teams bent our axles from heavy robots when we couldn't afford aluminum, not from dropping it!
In my experience, the difference between VEX and FRC robot budgeting is that in FRC, you make the majority of your purchases explicitly for the robot in question as it is designed, just because you can put just about anything you want on it. Only teams who have extensive in-house fabrication capabilities, or teams that have large elements of their design "style" really locked in place can afford to do it otherwise. In VEX, it's much more practical to have just about anything you'd ever want to put on your robot on hand, due to the limited number of legal parts. As a result, many well-established VEX programs, often those with multiple teams, strive to do exactly that, and have a vast stock of VEX parts available to their students that far exceeds what would ever be the sum of their robots' parts. This also helps with the extreme iterative nature of VEX, where complete robot rebuilds several times a season are commonplace for most of the more competitive teams. One way to offset this a little is to emphasize prototyping using dirt-cheap means, like wood, cardboard, PVC, and duct tape like we do in FRC, rather than using VEX itself as the prototyping system when parts aren't available.
5k in parts, plus 2k for new designs may be quite a bit much if you're just starting out with one team, but there are also far too many people who will tell you "VEX is super cheap, just register, buy a $500 Dual Control starter kit, and you're good to go!". You simply won't be able to compete on any meaningful level without investing quite a bit more into parts. A practice field makes a world of difference as well.
This goes for any robotics competition based around a kit and a limited subset of parts. Plenty of FLL and FTC teams exist that just work off a barebones kit, but the teams that strive to be the most competitive, and in my opinion, the teams that open their students up to the greatest opportunities, strive to go well beyond this and push the limitations on parts to their limits.