Quote:
Originally Posted by mentorDon
OOOHHH! Life isn't fair I'm told. How many of you squawking that sentiment have access to a sponsor with CNC equipment? Consider yourself lucky. And I'm willing to make a large wager most teams don't. We had one once. But with the economy as it is, they couldn't support us any longer. So we adapted to what we have. And then there is the lack of machine shops. Kansas City use to have shops scattered throughout the city. Not any more. Most of that work has moved to Mexico or China. I started working in a machine shop back in 1974. I have seen and experienced the change. And I don't see NASA building a shop here anytime soon.
Getting back to the rules, for the Robot:
4.4 Budget Constraints
R9 The total cost of all items on the ROBOT shall not exceed $4000 USD. All costs are to be determined as explained in Section
4.4: Budget Constraints. Exceptions are as follows:
A. individual COTS items that are less than $1 USD each and
B. KOP items
R11 The BOM cost of each non-KOP item must be calculated based on the unit fair market value for the material and/or labor,
except for labor provided by Team members (including sponsor employees who are members of the team), members of other
Teams, event provided Machine Shops and shipping.
How many Squawkers here could build a robot for less than $4000 if they had to count CNC machining time at $100+ per hour and all materials? (Programming and run time for just 1 or 2 parts would be even more costly.) Very few in my estimation. I don't care if you continue to use your machine shop sponser, you just need to count it in your budget.
Do they have rules in other sports to even the playing field? Yes they do! Ever heard of "salary caps"? NASCAR has a host of rules to keep the cars alike. Do I need to go on?
So there you have it. Life is either the 'haves' or the 'have nots'. The 'haves' never want to change the rules because they would lose their advantage. Seems to work out the same in First.
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I wish we had a CNC machine or sponsor. But we don't. In fact, we don't really have any machining sponsors to whom we send our parts - we really just cut everything out in our own shop in order to build our robot. And it's not even an actual machine shop - it's a space we rent out of a strip mall in which we've moved all our equipment into that we've gathered over the history of our team. And that's completely fine with us.
I understand your point, but I'd rather not see a rule change because without a doubt, those robots that do look absolutely beautiful, whether they were made by 50+ engineers or not, are like works of art and I'd hate to see them disappear because they're so inspiring to me.