Raising the $3500 limit?

[JakeGallagher]

This season I think the most money we spent was on food... o.O We don't have many local companies to give us money, so we have to make due without. Other teams, on the other hand have seemingly unlimited funding, so the cap is what saves smaller teams like ours.
I don't think I would add anything to our bot if they did raise the cap because we ended up with a very competitive robot on a pretty small budget.

Originally Posted by Greg McCoy

1 & 2: Agreed

3: Not sure what I think about spare parts...

4: I don't really agree with this...some teams use laptops and such when they are going for "Leadership in Controls" awards and such and that could take a major chunk out of the $3500. Besides, I don't see how an "expensive" OI would give teams a big advantage...It's an area where I'd like to see more innovation and quality.

On the bright side, I'm glad that the electronics cost limit is going up

This year we got a Leadership in Control award, and the only laptop we used was an old WinBook MIT donated to us. Judges don't care whether you have PowerMacs (as one team did) or flashy stuff like that when they are looking for the Leadership in Control Award--they're looking for the team who put the most effort into making their control system work perfectly. Though, I don't think our programmer would mind much if we had some better hardware...