Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunshine
Different strokes for different folks. It's all about the evolution of the individual team and how far mentors can/want to take them.
Who benefited the most. The team who bought a swerve drive from the vendor? Or the team that engineered or re-engineered the idea?
Yes, cots equal the playing field. I'm fine with that. But it's the journey not the destination. Don't buy all cots at the expense of learning.
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I'll say this. I don't think many teams buy COTS without a good reason. I know that on 68, we finally made the switch to COTS drive transmissions in 2014 after making them custom every year prior. Could we have made custom transmissions again that year? Sure. So why didn't we? Because that was something we knew we could buy a reliable COTS version of, and doing so would allow us to focus our efforts on other custom mechanisms and get parts out of the CAD lab and into the shop faster. That year, in no small part due to the amount of time we saved and the manpower buying COTS freed up for other things, we finally fulfilled our perpetual goal of having almost-identical practice and competition robots. Did it prevent some students on our team from learning about transmission design? I suppose, but it also allowed them to be more involved with learning other things and it improved our build season schedule and performance overall.
I think that was a trade worth making, and I suspect other teams that seem like they should be able to get by without as many COTS parts are evaluating their choices similarly. They aren't shorting their students out of the chance at learning, but rather allowing them to move on from systems that would otherwise consume a large part of their build season and inhibit having a functional or competitive robot. Whatever stage of development or competitiveness a team is at, they can move one rung further up the ladder and help their students learn something new by pushing their competitive ceiling with COTS parts.