Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by mentorDon

Getting back to the rules, for the Robot:

4.4 Budget Constraints
R9 The total cost of all items on the ROBOT shall not exceed $4000 USD. All costs are to be determined as explained in Section
4.4: Budget Constraints. Exceptions are as follows:
A. individual COTS items that are less than $1 USD each and
B. KOP items

R11 The BOM cost of each non-KOP item must be calculated based on the unit fair market value for the material and/or labor,
except for labor provided by Team members (including sponsor employees who are members of the team), members of other
Teams, event provided Machine Shops and shipping.

How many Squawkers here could build a robot for less than $4000 if they had to count CNC machining time at $100+ per hour and all materials? (Programming and run time for just 1 or 2 parts would be even more costly.) Very few in my estimation. I don't care if you continue to use your machine shop sponser, you just need to count it in your budget.

Nothing wrong with proposing that team/sponsor labour be accounted for in the robot cost—as long as you're also willing to consider what the appropriate rates would be for all reasonable circumstances, and also evaluate whether the robot cost limit needs to be changed. So how, specifically, would you construct a more equitable cost model?