I, too, am anxious to read the 2005 FRC rule book. To me, the note from FIRST appears to be guidelines, especially at the beginning stages of the note. In the second paragraph FIRST is says this:
"FIRST is providing the following vendor qualification criteria to be utilized by 2005 FRC teams to assist them in deciding whether to procure a particular vendor's product for use on their robot."
This is a guideline to tell teams how to pick a vendor in order to succeed through the FRC build season.
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Originally Posted by Greg Perkins
Also, i understand the rules fully, but does andymark.biz qualify those requirements???
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They list the criteria in the body of the note, as follows:
"The VENDOR must have a Federal Tax Identification number" - yep, AndyMark has that.
"The VENDOR makes their products available to all FIRST Robotics Competition teams." - Our products are available to anyone who buys them from our website, even competitors from other countries.
"Ideally, chosen VENDORS should have national distributors." - This is good criteria that teams should use. AndyMark provides distribution through yahoo.com (receiving orders), and can deliver quickly through UPS, FedEx, and USPS.
"The VENDOR must be able to ship their product within five (5) business days of receiving a valid purchase request." - We will do our best to ship our products within 5 days of our customers placing an order. In my opinion, this 5 days is very restrictive. I can think of countless items (bearings, gears, Bosch motors, playing field balls, tank treads, extruded aluminum, pneumatic devices) that did not adhere to this criteria in past FIRST games. I like this criteria if the word "must" was changed to "should".
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Originally Posted by Raul
Andy, have you gotten a seal of approval from FIRST or anything like that?
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I called FIRST for clarification today, and was told to proceed with our business plan to sell our off-the-shelf components to FRC teams (and anyone else).
Andy Baker