Quote:
Originally Posted by Basel A
Well, if it costs more than $400, no FRC team will be able to use it. If it costs less than $400.. well, that would be pretty amazing. So I think FRC will be fine.
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No. You are suffering from a lack of imagination. Once you stop thinking like a current FRC participant, how to do what I described becomes obvious.
Jane Doe's Robot Emporium offers a design(s), and a bill(s) of materials. Each item in the BOM(s) sells for under $400, individually.
Any FRC team that wants to, buys the many items (each under $400) needed to acquire their favorite, complete BOM.
Once all of the items arrive, the resulting pile can be assembled into an excellent competition machine, plus control devices.
If FIRST forbids buying all of the items, any team that cares to, buys N minus M of the items. Where M is large enough to satisfy FIRST's rules. They do some trivial cutting, etc. to create the M items out of "raw" materials like extruded aluminum.
So long as on-the-field performance is the metric that dominates the thinking of many (How many? Most? Too many? Exactly the right number? Too few?) teams, I'm going to predict that this scenario will come to pass.
The question is "When?", not "Whether?".
As the number of teams grows, if the allure of the proverbial Blue Champion Banner isn't radically altered, the number of potential customers for an IKEA-style superbot also grows, and the "invisible hand" grows stronger.
Discuss.