Quote:
Originally Posted by marshall
It's hard to parse this post but... Are you trying to make an argument that AndyMark isn't affordable? I think you'll find that you're going to spend more time and money trying to engineer a solution to fit a motor to a gearbox it wasn't designed for or worse you're going to spend hard-earned money and end up buying something you can't use or use mistakenly and then have to engineer around...
Honestly, I can understand teams complaining because a product from AM or Vex doesn't work due to a bad design or something (looking at you GEM gearboxes and CIM encoder widgets!) but I don't understand the complaints about cost. I've been involved with FRC since 2003 and FRC has never been cheaper than it is now for a team to be competitive.
It seems like it is becoming common to see teams not use their resources properly and then blame some grand FRC supplier conspiracy. No one is colluding to make gearboxes more expensive for FRC teams.
AndyMark, Vex, CTRE, and REV have significantly lowered the barriers to entry for FRC teams and are continuing to drive down the costs for those teams to be competitive. Are the parts expensive? Yes. Is FRC expensive? Yes. Do teams need to plan and budget accordingly? Yes. Does FIRST need to provide better resources for teams to plan with? Yeah, they probably do. Are cheaper gearboxes from China a solution? Maybe, but I doubt it.
EDIT: AliExpress is definitely a legal vendor for these gearboxes and other parts but I don't know about the motors and highly doubt the motors are legal.
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To put some actual numbers behind Marshall's claim that it's never been cheaper. ESCs are one of the larger costs in building bots. So I took a look back at the costs of the cheapest legal ESC in FRC going back to 2003. I've attached the graph here. I'm fairly certain you could do that for any single component of FRC bots and find things are getting cheaper. [1]
I'll leave why it feels like it's getting more expensive to compete as an exercise. I have some theories but I think I'd like to see what others think.
[1] My process sucked for this I used archive.org and found the product I was looking for. I'm fairly certain of that flat period from 2005 to 2010 but since IFI's website blocked web crawlers from accessing the 884 page in their robots.txt I don't have that information and can only interpolate. But I don't recall the prices changing drastically in that point. If Paul/JVN/etc have more correct information feel free to correct me.