Quote:
Originally Posted by sanddrag
While I haven't yet read this thread, I feel inclined to comment. We here at 696 too have noticed the proliferation of prefabricated parts and mechanisms in FIRST in the last few years. It certainly is a different FIRST than when I started in it 15 years ago. Nonetheless, we've invested quite heavily in CNC manufacturing software and equipment in the past 3 years. While our students are gaining awesome skills while making awesome parts, we've also noticed that it's increasingly becoming a losing battle to compete with some of these COTS parts. I can spend more than two weeks designing and manufacturing a gearbox that costs me maybe $150 and hopefully works like I designed it, or I can spend 10 minutes punching my credit cart into a website to get a roughly equivalent outcome (performance-wise) for $100 more.
While I'd like for us to make everything, like in the good ol days, it's not competitive for us to do so anymore. I mean shoot, we even used to make sprockets from bar stock. Now, every time we order a COTS part, it's not because we cahttp://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/editpost.php?do=editpost&p=1530202n't make it in-house, it's because we've elected to buy time.
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Precisely. The only way to compete with the highly advanced COTS parts is to manufacture year round because that's exactly what the COTS part supply chain is doing.
Once you add the students learning into the equation it's no longer even a CNC fabrication problem. You need to teach them how to use the machine so now they need to go year round. That education alone on an advanced CNC machine could consume all of the 6 week build easily.
Sooner or later - the top teams that used to show exceptional levels of fabrication will no longer be able to avoid rampant COTS purchases unless they are a year round vocational school. This is already the case with the FRC control system. Even if you can fabricate that (Team 221 for example) you can't legally use it in the FRC competition.
We are on the same page. I had this exact revelation when Team 11 got their HAAS CNC mill and lathe. This again is why I am trying hard to setup a Makerspace. Simply put: we can't turn out the sort of fabrication I think people want us to turn out without committing to resource access year round such that when the build starts the students are basically already trained operators with a task. I can see how other manufacturing heavy places can manage this - they can bring the students to their workplaces and bootstrap them off that apprenticeship any time during the year. Let's be fair: NJ as a State is not known as the being a machine manufacturing powerhouse anymore (there are some exceptions but not enough). So if we can't introduce the skills as a byproduct of the local industry then we can serve the interest by merely providing access and letting curiosity do the rest.
In the end, however, I see the inevitable coming. Adults and business people squeezing the competition until there are more consumers and less fabricators. FIRST FRC just needs to adapt if they are not okay with it and personally I don't think we should be entirely okay with all that means. My only solace in all this is that if this is allowed to run unchecked my personal goal to mentor and help my community is unaffected because I don't care if we win the competition personally (I know some people even on my team will not agree with this, that's fine). I don't have to rely on Team 11/193 to fund my Makerspace concept. I now own 3 FRC robots personally: 2 AM14U2 chassis and a custom one. I have my own small and portable CNC tools I can offer. When the students come looking with the necessary curiosity the resources are there cause for me that's what this is about. I don't care who wins FRC: I care that my students can achieve unhindered by obstacles put in place with the very same consumerism that created FRC in the first place when we drove manufacturing offshore exploiting underpaid labor. I have been around FRC for 20 years so I remember the ideals when it was U.S. FIRST. I am glad we became global but global is still a village of villages. This is my village, they got me where I am, now I owe them some favors in return even if some people don't get it or even understand it.