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Originally Posted by bEdhEd
Also, if you find it demoralizing that you think your team can build a better bot with mostly prefab parts as compared to original parts, then I recommend your team take the time and pull in the resources in the off-season to learn how to fabricate better than what can be bought. I understand that this will be a challenge, as you mention that you are a low resource team, but the other strategic planning that FRC teams face is in fundraising, sponsorships, and grants, not just a game. Do you happen to have any nearby teams that can help you make parts or help the students learn how to do so?
In the mean time, while the resources are low get as much COTS as can be afforded, and build a great robot. A "great robot" doesn't have to be an extreme performance machine, but rather is a machine that can be a valuable alliance member. How can you use your current resources to be a valuable alliance member? I feel like that question is more important than thinking about how it's built over how it performs.
Great teams don't happen overnight, and it will be a process that can take quite a few seasons. My team never got a blue banner until season 13.
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Thank you for the advice, and we will do our best to reach out to other teams in the off-season. Utah isn't exactly a hotbed of robotics activity, but I'm sure we can find someway to collaborate. As for the business and fundraising side of things, I'm only the design guy for our team so I don't have many skills in that region. As for trying to be valuable for an alliance, one of the reasons I'm so salty about the MCC is it does virtually everything we were planning on doing to be valuable in an alliancen.
Quote:
Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird
Why don't you just take the COTS parts into account when designing? If you know what you can buy off the shelf don't you have a solid baseline for what standards you should be performing at? If you know a kit bot runs x ft/s and has y amount of pushing power, shouldn't you design above that? If you know they have an intake that is constrained to work in one way can't you use that against them?
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We do. I'm not bashing against all COTS parts, which as I said before have been key for many years in helping us get a functional robot out. I only dislike game-specific solutions that require little to no thought from a team. Most COTS parts make it easier to build the best robot that
you can design. The MCC from WCP gives a competitive robot with no thinking involved.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
Specialized COTS parts allow things that are just not possible for the vast majority of teams for pretty much any team that can fund raise a few hundred extra bucks. Is that really that bad of a thing?
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No, it's not that bad of a thing. I agree that the majority of COTS parts are a mostly positive development for an individual team, as well as preparing team members for a future in engineering where many parts can be COTS.
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Originally Posted by Sunshine
90%+ of all the people responding are agreeing with each other.
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I agree.