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Originally Posted by Jeff Waegelin
I like that solution. It seems like a pretty good balance to me. It's obviously up to Andy and the Technokats to decide how they would want to market their "product" but I think that idea may be a good compromise. Plus, it would probably be easier to ship machined parts and instructions than it would be to ship a fully-assembled product.
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Jeff,
I would argue that no "solution" is necessary.
Teams will always do their own thing. I feel a ruling from FIRST or a "compromise" as has been suggested is silly. Again, we've already got other design constraints, and FIRST could just be limiting a good thing.
Let's face it, a team of bad mentors is still going to put the gearboxes together by themselves with no student involvement. Has your rule changed anything? Not really.
What Rich has said about being a "jerk" certainly applies here.
I would do something very similar. (Yeah... I'm a jerk).
In fact (thinking back) we DID do that this year. On this year's robot we used the "rookie drivetrain" provided in the kit to power our arm. We took the (note: all premade) gearboxes and components, laid them down in a big pile in front of the kids, and said "go to it". They went to it.
In retrospect, it was one of the coolest meetings we had. Nothing like a bunch of kids elbowing the college mentors out of the way, and working together to make that huge mountain of stuff into something moving.
JV