[techhelpbb]

'Grumpy' 40 year old man here speaking for myself:
When I was a kid the closest thing you were gonna find to a pre-made robots were:

R/C cars
Model airplanes
RB5X robots (of which I have 2)
Heathkit Heros
Robotic arms
Armatron which is still really a toy
Legos with the original control box that was not battery operated at all

Now I am impressed with the variety of the kit parts.
I think it's great that it lets you build a robot part by part with barely any machine tools.

Here's the problem - it also lets you not learn how to use machine tools.
It lets you under-utilize tools you have.
It is teaching far too little about electronics.

So on the one hand I want FIRST to grow.
On the other I often wonder if FIRST is more about growing itself than challenging and encouraging the students to their full potential.
It is possible to win at these games without doing much down and dirty fabrication at all - and in fact - if you spend too much time getting too involved in that sort of thing you might actually work against yourself.

I think these limitations mean it's actually possible to outgrow FIRST:
I just put a AndyMark AM14U2 together with a complete RoboRIO control system, NavX, part of a pneumatic system, encoders and co-processor in 2 days. With the co-processor being the longest delay.
At some point it's possible some teams - if they plan really carefully - could be done in < 2 weeks.
So what is the project too big then?
I can see this actually getting boring.