build season needs to be longer.

[nuggetsyl]

Who here wants to lay out a million dollars on tires people may or may not want to buy? You can't blame AndyMark or Vex Pro for limited supply. Forecasting is extremely hard. Ordering too much can cost you dearly.

[bEdhEd]

We got lucky and ordered tires a day before they sold out. Sometimes what helps is timing. It would be neat if for at least one season, FIRST tried to do a 7 week season. Maybe then we'd see the real effect of extra time.

[magnets]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

Who here wants to lay out a million dollars on tires people may or may not want to buy? You can't blame AndyMark or Vex Pro for limited supply. Forecasting is extremely hard. Ordering too much can cost you dearly.

FIRST is dumping everybody's time and money in the garbage by not telling suppliers that they're going to need certains parts. I understand that it "adds to the real world engineering challenge", but if our goal is "to make FIRST available to every high school student", shouldn't we try to help the suppliers that make this program possible not waste money?

I've heard people say that no suppliers are given advanced information about the game, but is this still totally true? I know AndyMark knows what the game piece is ahead of time, but I'm guessing they had no idea that the game would favor pneumatic wheels, otherwise they would have came up with the kitbot upgrade kit earlier, and would have made more wheels/Rhino tread parts.

[New Lightning]

The challenge with letting suppliers ahead of time causes the problem of information control. Who do you tell what information and then what is done with that. For example if AndyMark was told that they would need to have available a bunch of treads and pneumatic wheels then obviously they start buying more of this. Now I don't know how many AndyMark employees also serve as mentors to teams, but if they did and they started noticing that hey, where getting a lot more pneumatic tires, or we need to produce and have available more Rhino treads, maybe my team is going to need a stronger than usual drive train this year. Does this really tell you any accurate details of the game, no; however, it does give these teams some time in the offseason to start working on chassis designs a head of time and give them a head start when kick off come around.

[IronicDeadBird]

Actually what would be interesting is to compare what teams order compared to what they consume through the build season, and what just goes to waste. For all we know teams could be over ordering parts and then going "wait no we didn't need this many" and things just go to waste.
Mayhaps someone should start a surplus thread where teams post valuable items that for whatever reason they purchased but no longer need.

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Please God no.

As the lead build mentor, I can only take so much robot build before I get fired from my day job.

[nuclearnerd]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

Please God no.

As the lead build mentor, I can only take so much robot build before I get fired from my day job.

We rescheduled half of our build meetings to the evening for the same reason. That said, I think an open build season would help, rather than hurt. If you can only put in so much time, than you could space it out with shorter meetings over a longer build season. Your boss would thank you.

[jman4747]

Originally Posted by nuclearnerd

We rescheduled half of our build meetings to the evening for the same reason. That said, I think an open build season would help, rather than hurt. If you can only put in so much time, than you could space it out with shorter meetings over a longer build season. Your boss would thank you.

This concept gets lost to people so much and I don't get it. If there was no bag-n-tag you could spend the same amount of hours working but over a larger time period. You can afford to have fewer meetings per week over a longer time and pace your build in a way that best suits your team.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by jman4747

This concept gets lost to people so much and I don't get it. If there was no bag-n-tag you could spend the same amount of hours working but over a larger time period. You can afford to have fewer meetings per week over a longer time and pace your build in a way that best suits your team.

Could you? Yes.

But there is another concept that gets lost to people. Parkinson's Law, to be exact. "Work expands to fill time allotted" is the usual short phrasing. And what that means is that you will invariably think you have more time to spread out... but you'll really use that time to upgrade your robot instead of relaxing.

[orangemoore]

Originally Posted by EricH

Could you? Yes.

But there is another concept that gets lost to people. Parkinson's Law, to be exact. "Work expands to fill time allotted" is the usual short phrasing. And what that means is that you will invariably think you have more time to spread out... but you'll really use that time to upgrade your robot instead of relaxing.

This is 100% true. For our FTC season we seem to manage to do less in FTC than FRC over a period of time that is twice as long.

[ToddF]

Originally Posted by jman4747

This concept gets lost to people so much and I don't get it. If there was no bag-n-tag you could spend the same amount of hours working but over a larger time period. You can afford to have fewer meetings per week over a longer time and pace your build in a way that best suits your team.

For elite teams, the "six week build season" does not exist. They work on their designs right up until championship. Building a practice bot and designing mechanisms that can be swapped out before competitions allows for continuous evolution of your robot mechanisms throughout the competition season.

[philso]

Originally Posted by ToddF

For elite teams, the "six week build season" does not exist. They work on their designs right up until championship. Building a practice bot and designing mechanisms that can be swapped out before competitions allows for continuous evolution of your robot mechanisms throughout the competition season.

It might be worth noting that many of the elite teams also "develop technologies" for use in some upcoming season during the off-season time. When it comes time to apply those technologies during the build season, they can do it much faster.

[ToddF]

Originally Posted by philso

It might be worth noting that many of the elite teams also "develop technologies" for use in some upcoming season during the off-season time. When it comes time to apply those technologies during the build season, they can do it much faster.

Amen!

Here's a presentation I gave at the 2012 Hampton Roads FRC Summit on exactly this concept. Doing drive train development during the summer rather than during build season marked a turning point in the competitiveness of our team. It's the only way we can compete with the teams out there with high levels of fabrication resources.

[Donut]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

Actually what would be interesting is to compare what teams order compared to what they consume through the build season, and what just goes to waste. For all we know teams could be over ordering parts and then going "wait no we didn't need this many" and things just go to waste.
Mayhaps someone should start a surplus thread where teams post valuable items that for whatever reason they purchased but no longer need.

There used to be CD-Swap for this, but it was not often used so it went dormant and the links for it got removed at some point. You can still read the About page and browse the now empty item list.


To the point of this thread, the run on parts that always happens is a good example of real world issues with timing and availability. At my day job we just had to tell a contractor they will likely have to wait 9 months for install on a job since they missed our downtime window in December. I also agree though that the shenanigans around difficult to obtain game pieces, short order windows, etc. introduces unnecessary costs and headaches that provide more arguments for a school to choose a different program.

We have ~3000 teams right now, I wonder how much faster we will see things go out of stock when we have 15000.