[DFTF] Budgeting for a Competitive Robot...

[Peter Matteson]

The rookie number the number I came up with was so high because I assumed the following: No spare motors, full legal amount of CIMS, no pnuematics lying around the shop, no motor controllers, wire, electrical connectors, fasteners, not sure of the raw material stock...

Originally Posted by ayeckley

I understand Joe's situation; I'm referring to the veterans that describe spending more to build their robot each year than is intuitive to me. Perhaps I'm expecting everyone to be as thrifty as we are (out of necessity).

I get what your saying, but I see the opposite side of things. There are many crip crap items that will chew a budget quick if you don't have a stockpiled inventory of small items that people seem to forget you need to buy. These things aren't necessarily in the robot BOM because that rules don't require it. That's why I say a $3500 budget robot really cost about $4000 to build. As I stated earlier add shipping costs to get the parts and that bill goes higher.

Anyone who claims they can build a robot for under $2000 is either re-using a ot of COTS, motor controllers, and pnuematics from old robots or has drastically under estimated the value of items that they have scrounged as well as consumables that don't factor into the robots BOM cost.

When I start to add up costs or mill bits, grinding wheels, argon, tungston, weld wire, emory cloth, drill bits, carbide inserts, bandsaw blades, cutting oil, tap magic, taps, loctite, sander belts, etc. The costs become high very quickly. I feel like a lot people here have overlooked these types of items, granted not everyone uses all of these, but they are REAL COSTS in factoring the TRUE PRICE to build a robot. I'm not even touching upon buying capital equipment like tools and machines that you can use for years,

I'm just trying to add up all those little items that on many teams just show up in the shop because people go and buy them on their own. Speaking from experience myself and 3 of the other engineers on my team in some of our leaner years have spent upwards of $500 each on these types of items, prototyping materials, and field parts.