Sippin' on the haterade

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

It is an excellent challenge, I agree. Our rookie year robot was under $100 (plus kit money) and ended up top seed. That is, however, not the point. What a team with a $5000 budget can do with a $100 limit is *very* different from what a team with a $100 budget can do with that limit. The $5000 team can build 48 prototypes, 1 practice bot, and 1 actual robot. The $100 team has one chance and no practice bot. In short, my point is: Money makes a huge difference.

Part of the challenge of FIRST is designing your team's effort to acquire more money, not simply building the robot. If you've got $100 this year, maybe do some sales/demonstrations/begging letters and try to get $300 next year. The team with $5k budgets in your example probably didn't have that money fall out of the sky with no strings attached. They probably had to go around and ask for it. Even if they got lucky with a single extremely generous donor, they still had to find a way to make the extremely generous donors in their community aware of them. Maybe there's one in your community that you just haven't found yet. Every time our team does a big fundraising push we seem to come back with substantial donations from unexpected places (last year we got some money from a beauty salon).

If a team has lots of money such that they can outsource their entire robot, that's a measure of success. If your goal is to be successful in the competition and the competition permits use of outsourcing, lots of money, and professional help and you're not using them, then it is unlikely you'll be consistently successful at the competition. FIRST has permitted all these things for its entire existence, and is unlikely to change.

Background: I'm on a consistently well-performing team whose most expensive tool is a 30-year-old drill press and whose biggest tool upgrade recently has been a vice that's bolted to a table. It takes us 4 hours to make bumper brackets because someone has to hacksaw through them and we can't afford to have it taken to a machine shop.