[moderated] pic: The 2006 NiagaraFIRST Triplets!

[FourPenguins]

I'm not going to judge here (more than I can help) but as much as the collaboration thing is great and is an excellent show of gracious professionalism, I don't entirely understand why you would do this.

Originally Posted by Holtzman

Yes, but at this time, neither 1503 nor 1680 has the design or the programming resources to design and program their own competitive robots. It is for this reason that they are still a part of the collaboration. Perhaps in the future, when they have established more of their own resources, they will be able to venture off on their own.

The only question I have for you on this point (and in this thread really) is why you don't just function as separate team who share machining/mentor resources. The only reason I ask this is because in my experience, the larger the organization (and yours is obviously rather large) the more problems you encounter and the less fun everyone has. (I can tell you that there have been times on MORT that I've thought, "Now if only we had only these 15 kids and these three mentors...")
But the bottom line is that they're great bots and I applaud your engineering and machining talent, all three of you.
//edited 2-28