I finally decided to chime in on this issue. Since I am part of this "conspiricy to undermine the values of FIRST" [/sarcasm], I decided to tell a few details that people not involved in this would not know. This is not an attack on people or their arguements, but an attempt to straighten out a few facts.
The arm did not arrive in the mail at our lab pre-built. The pieces that needed to be machined/welded were done, but we assembled it and fixed it. Some people may say that this trains us to be factory assembly line workers. However, we helped design it, know how it works, and could put it together without instructions. Secondly, It did not work right after we assembled it. For example, We sheared the bolts holding the drive sprocket to the lower part of the arm, so we
engineered a solution. "We" means the people in team 254's lab at that moment (about 8 students, 1 engineer and
2 college students. We then called Kingman and informed them of the problem, not the solution. That is just one example.
Some people have said that we (the students) are not as invloved in the design process. However, we had numerous hours of meetings discussing the design of the robot (for example, of the extensions for ball herding). We met on Monday and spent two hours discussing different solutions to the problem that we saw. We then compared our results with Kingman's results. Then on Tuesday, we spent another two hours deciding which design (of our two favorites from Monday) we liked best. Then, we called Kingman and it happened that we both agreed about the best solution to the problem (that we had room/weight/resources for). Again, this is but one example.
Another thing people are saying is that we should do this with a rookie team. We decided to collaborate with Kingman (and they with us) because we both felt that we had experiences to bring to the table. We do mentor rookie teams, and I am not saying that we do not learn from them. However, we feel that our strengths complement each other.
Thank you for all your feedback to our experiment. Please try not to attack something you do not know all the details about. However, continue to give your input, especially if you have something new to bring to the table.
Sorry for the long post. This is a complicated subject.
