FRC Blogged - An Early Option

[Jon Stratis]

Teams can also narrow down the list pretty easily. For example, our team always uses the maximum number of CIM motors (4), and we only get 2 in the KoP. If CIM's are available, we might as well pick up 2 more. We'll gladly take new batteries, and one of our multimeters isn't working too well anymore (even with a fresh battery), so we'll take one off First Choice this year to replace it. Since we never use Pneumatics (and have very little expertise on it within the team), we can take a risk to eliminate all of those options, and just pay the price later in the highly unlikely event that we change our minds.

The big question is on game-specific items. We'd love to get some additional game pieces (assuming each robot manipulates multiple game pieces in a game... if it's a track ball like overdrive, we really only need 1), but you won't know that until January. Do we need to wait on the rest of our order because we aren't sure on this one item? Can we spend half of our points early, and save the other half for game-specific items later?

[maddoctor90]

I really like the idea of being able to use the product vouchers early. We pre-order certain parts that we use every year on the robot like (batteries, aluminum, cim motors, etc). This will allow us to buy many of these parts with the vouchers instead of trying to figure out what to use them for during the build season.

[dtengineering]

Hopefully this will allow overseas teams to receive much of their KoP in time for it to be useful for the build season.

While this is a non-issue for American teams, and a minor issue for Canadian teams, it is a big issue for many of our international colleagues, some of whom did not receive their KoP until several weeks into the build season.

Jason

[Tottanka]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Hopefully this will allow overseas teams to receive much of their KoP in time for it to be useful for the build season.

While this is a non-issue for American teams, and a minor issue for Canadian teams, it is a big issue for many of our international colleagues, some of whom did not receive their KoP until several weeks into the build season.

Jason

Exactly.
And wer'e gonna use that early order 100%.