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Originally Posted by Paul Copioli
Marc P.,
What exactly do you disagre with? If the limit was $500, could you build the same robot you did with $1,200? All I am saying is that a "big money" team probably could and a low budget team probably couldn't. Is this what you disagree with?
As to the quality of a product: You say that throwing more money at a design will not make it better. Many times this is just not true. Throwing money at a design is one of the easiest ways to make something more functional. I am actually in that situation right now with a development we are working on. The trick in many engineering applications is to make it good enough for the task at hand at the lowest cost.
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I have to totally agree with Paul on the point above. I remember looking at robots back when I got into FIRST in 1999 and saw teams with custom aluminum sprockets and gears that weren't even legal to buy, but perfectly legal to make from stock. Huge sizes, light weight you name it. That is, however, only if you have the resources available to your team. So if you were a rookie without those resources, you got the gears and sprockets from small parts (At a not so cheap rate BTW) if were a veteren team with good resources, you got the same $300 or so dollars from small parts PLUS nearly unlimited gears and sprockets in almost any material you wanted. So where does the money limit get you? It will usually hurt the lower funded teams that can't get these parts any other way but by purchasing them. Look at some of the past robots and you will see that putting the cost limitation on FIRST or restricting the suppliers for parts will have little or no effect on a resourceful veteren team.
In fact it seems kind of against the real world way of doing things to say to the students, "hey we need this sprocket that you can buy off the shelf for $19 but instead we are going to make the exact same thing for $70??"