Purchasing a new kit

[Justin1636]

this year was our rookie year the problem we have is that half of our team graduates this year. Our teacher is setting up an off season FIRST class to train all the new members. I was wondering if we could purchase a kit of parts and train them on all the parts from programming to pneumatics. If you know of where or how we could please tell me.

[tkwetzel]

I don't know about purchasing a whole kit, but I know that FIRST supplied a list of suppliers for many (if not all) of the parts. But I also know that many teams use parts from past kits to train new students...I know you don't have a large collection of parts yet, but you could use this years parts and/or robot to do some training. Or, you could use whatever you can from this year's kit and just order the parts that you need to for rookie training. Just a few suggestions.

[Josh Hambright]

What Tyler said is dead on. You can get the control system from IFI (http://www.ifirobotics.com) as well as some of the other parts. As far as another set of things like the kit chasis and whatnot, you might consider posting something on cd swap(http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/parts.php?) I know many teams didn't use the kit parts and would possibly be willing to trade or give you the extra stuff they didn't use. The wheels, pneumatics, and other kit parts can all probably be purchased off the net or from local suppliers. You might want to look into the EDU-Robot Mini RC stuff that IFI sells http://ifirobotics.com/edu-rc.shtml it would make a good starting point for a training bot, its a scaled down simple version of the kit control system.


I just read back over my post, and realized i left out a couple potentialy helpful links.
Need pneumatic cylinders for learning about the mighty power of AIR??!?
http://www.bimba.com/techctr/first_free_frm.htm
AndyMark has some really good stuff for building FIRST robots, and they are cool guys too!
http://www.andymark.biz
Need Wheels?
http://www.skywaywheels.com/
Check out this thread for more suppliers:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=31971

You can buy metal and plastics online at places like Online Metals (http://onlinemetals.com/) and McMaster-Carr (http://www.mcmaster.com/)

Good Luck with your offseason training.

[kevin.li.rit]

Originally Posted by Justin1636

this year was our rookie year the problem we have is that half of our team graduates this year. Our teacher is setting up an off season FIRST class to train all the new members. I was wondering if we could purchase a kit of parts and train them on all the parts from programming to pneumatics. If you know of where or how we could please tell me.

If you guys are strapped for cash or just want to save some money,an alternative could be just to dissassemble certain parts of your robot. Have them rebuild and test the systems. I.E. take off the pneumatics, unwire it, unchain it etc. Then have them reattach them to your bot.

We usually end up disassembling our bots just for spare parts.

[Justin1636]

this was our rookie year so we dont have any parts from later years so we need a new kit or parts from another team that has extra