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Re: How Much Does it Cost to Run a Team?
Short Answer: If I was intending to do 2 regionals + champs, I probably wouldn't want to do it on a budget much less than $20,000.
Long Answer: To give a more accurate number, your team needs to make some decisions. Travel costs are often second only to registration fees in terms of expenditure (depending on team size and distance to events). If the team does not subsidize trips at all, it will allow the team to operate on a significantly smaller budget, but at the cost of shifting a sizable monetary burden over to the students. Similar choices have to be made for team apparel, food during meetings, and so on.
The price of the robot itself and parts beyond the KOP is greatly affected by your machining capabilities. If you have extensive machining resources, you can probably build a robot on less money since you can make better use of raw materials. For example, if you have good sheet metal capabilities, you can basically build your entire robot out of riveted aluminum sheet metal assemblies, which can be a very economical way to construct a robot. Anyway, to make a bit of a generalization, I would aim for at least $2000 for additional robot parts. You can most definitely build a robot on way less (I've done it myself...), but $2000 will give you more options (conversely, you can spend the full allowable $3500 on a robot, but it is by no means necessary to be competitive).
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Team 1219: 2009 - Mentor
Team 587: 2005 - Animator, 2006-2008 - Team Captain
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