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Originally Posted by Steve W
Could you please explain the differences in your statement between hardware and software. As I see it the argument holds equally true with either.
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With hardware, teams can take a CAD drawing (or whatever you guys call them), send them off to a machinist, and get the parts back in a few days. Thus, if a team has settled on a certain drive train/gear box/whatever, all they must do to get a new Part X is send it off to a shop. Thus, while teams are encouraged to spend time thinking about ways they could improve their Part X, they're not forced to reinvent Part X from scratch each year (as some interpretations of R71 seem to say).
If you basically take the rule (as some have suggested) to mean that you have to start from scratch (i.e. you can use a pseudo-code/code outline or similar, but no actual code), you're forced to redo each year the simple things. Imagine if every year, teams were forced to do CAD drawings for every part of their robot, even if the drawings were the exact same as a previous year.
This is the real parallel we're talking about.
Paul