Can you sell a cRIO?

[team-4480]

Hi,

We have an old cRIO laying around, not doing anything but sitting in a bucket of other outdated technology. We would like to have another roboRio that we could use for training the younger people how to program and wire, but don't have the budget for another Rio. Plus we use Python which is much harder to run on the old system. I know FIRST teams were able to buy the cRIO at a nice discount thanks to National Instruments which makes me think that they probably outlawed selling it for obvious reasons. The other problem I guess is that who would want the old control system if it costs more than the new system?

Anyways, I was just curious if there is a way to pawn off the cRio that doesn't break any wishes that NI possessed?

[frcguy]

I am not sure if selling it is allowed, but a search for cRIO on ebay brings up several FRC models that are being sold. From what I have read the main problem with selling it is that is is not really useful to anyone other than an FRC team because the cRIO that was sold to FRC teams has an FPGA programmed exclusively for FRC use. You could potentially use it on a practice robot or some kind of demo control board to teach new team members FRC electronics principles.

[dradel]

Allowed to sell??? The way I see it is the team bought it when they paid the fee of 5000

[Rangel]

Just make sure you check if your school has rules about selling team equipment. For us, although purchases are made for the team, everything still technically belongs to the school and we can't sell anything.

[MrForbes]

If it's school property, there may be some applicable laws about selling it (as with any other public property disposal, such as it must be auctioned, etc). But other than that, I don't know of any prohibitions.

[Sperkowsky]

You are probably allowed to sell it but to who? There's no benefit to it over something like a rpi or an arduino to someone outside of FRC.

[FrankJ]

There is this thread

The IO modules are probably worth more than the chassis.

For industrial applications, a crio is a lot more useful than an arduino

[dradel]

I would assume that the i's would be dotted and the t's crossed with the school/system prior to offering for sale.

[team-4480]

We don't have to worry about it being school property since at the time we received the cRIO, we were 100% sponsor funded. Since it appears that the consensus is that selling the cRIO is indeed legal, we just have to find a buyer somewhere....

[dradel]

The 100% sponsor thing may not free you. If you are a school team I would clear it with the district first.

[tcjinaz]

Originally Posted by dradel

The 100% sponsor thing may not free you. If you are a school team I would clear it with the district first.

Plus, the purchaser will need all the cool extra S/W to reprogram the FPGA as required. As it is currently programmed (the P in FPGA) it is probably mostly useless to most of the world.

T
My real job involves programming FPGA's