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Unread 06-08-2004, 03:51
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Cory Cory is offline
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AKA: Cory McBride
FRC #0254 (The Cheesy Poofs)
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Re: It is about the robots (OpEd)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Karthik
No. Not at all. Buying is a result of smart thinking. From a business perspective, why spend 80+ man hours, and $200+ on parts building a gear box, when you can buy a tested one for similar monetary cost. This is what we call smart business decision. The time saved on these gearboxes can used to teach lots of other engineering principles. Companies make decisions like these on a regular basis. Why do something yourself, when you can save money by having someone else do it.

This is right on. I can't agree more with Karthik. Last season we decided we were going to build the T-kats 2003 transmission. We did all the drawings in inventor, spent a lot of money on parts, and tons of time machining. I can't even count how many hours myself, a professional machinist, a parent from our school, and another student spent making the thing, and we still didnt finish it on time for a number of reasons.

I can't even tell you how happy I would've been if these were available for sale last year. We could've paid essentially the same monetary price, maybe slightly more, and had to do next to no work on it ourselves. A drivetrain is the integral part of any robot.

Just think of how much less pressure you would be under throughout build if you could say to yourself "Hey, I bought that transmission from that Andy Baker guy, and man does it work great. And the best part is, we didnt have to spend any time to design it or build it, instead we got to focus all our effort into making a killer arm/whatever"

It's a fact that many teams lack the engineering resources to make anything approaching the level of sophistication of a Technokats gearbox. This is something that could truly level the playing field, and allow students to feel MORE inspired when they create a killer function for their robot because they didnt have to work out drive problems for six straight week.s

$0.02 Cory
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