Quote:
Originally Posted by matthewdenny
My first instinct is that this seems counter to the spirit of the competition. In retrospect go though I don't see how this is materially different from a team outsourcing the manufacturing of physical rebook parts to a company. It is quite possible that there are teams that are interested primarily in the building and not programming of a robot. for those teams they can still learn quite a bit from just the actual manufacturing of the machine minus the programming and still be inspired, perhaps even more so if programming has been your Achilles' heel in the past.
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So by equivalency could a team interested in programming ask a hardware design group to design them a robot to meet the challenge and receive a parts list and cad drawings? Then assemble the robot per spec so that they can program it?
In my mind, it's one thing to design a cad drawing and then have it laser cut or fabricated-- it was your design. It's another to farm out the actual design work.
How would this conversation go over at St. Louis?
FRC kid 1: Wow! That's an exciting autonomous you have there-- you carry all 3 containers and a stack of totes to the center *every* time!
FRC kid 2: Yeah-- we paid a firm to write that for us-- it was well worth it! We were clueless how to even start but they said if we added encoders here, and there and switches here and there that they could make it work so that's what we did!