Nearly Officially Official: cRIO Control System To Be Reused

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

While NI (and every other FIRST sponsor) may like the goals of FIRST, they all stand to gain financially in the long run from success in FIRST - whether through more available engineers or through larger market share of their components. And that's most likely the only way they can justify spending millions of dollars in donations to their shareholders.

That's pretty much how I understand the mission of FIRST regarding developing partnerships with sponsors. It can be a win/win situation for the sponsors and the students whose futures are impacted by the sponsors. The students are also impacted by working with engineers who may be employed by FIRST sponsors or associated with them.

Jane

[GaryVoshol]

One of the biggest reasons any company sponsors FIRST (or similar organizations) is to spur interest in their fields of subject matter. That way they will have people inspired (ooo, there's that word!) to take classes, research and internships in college, and there will be a pool of candidates to hire when jobs are open.

[Greg McKaskle]

Whenever the price of the cRIO comes up, wildly different numbers get tossed around. I'm not trying to defend Mr. Steele or NI sales folks, but shed light on the different numbers given.

To find the upper bound on the price, you visit the NI site and spec out the cRIO and modules. The closest off-shelf unit goes for 3K, modules add to 1.5K, this is street price with no educational discounts or volume discounts. But what about the software? LabVIEW FDS plus Realtime plus Vision is 8.5K. These aren't apples to apples comparisons since the cRIO for FRC is somewhat custom, and technically only part of Vision is being installed, but then add the Control portion of the Control and Simulation module, etc. I'm not going to try and estimate the value of the Wind River Workbench product and VxWorks license, but they are highly valued on the street as well.

To find the lower bound, you assume that software is free, no, its worth fifty cents for the silver disk, right? Gotta love it when your time is so easily discounted. You then look at the cost to build and ship the controllers. In part because of supplier donations, this number is of course well below the street price. I have not seen anything in writing, and I'm not speaking on behalf of FIRST, but in Atlanta, I believe the statement was that the costs for extra units and replacement units would be similar in price to previous years. I have no further details, and no idea if anything has changed.

So, it is very easy to make up big numbers and small numbers, and depending on your accounting system, both are valid. Good thing it is all funny money, eh.

A quick comment about NI's motivations. The leadership of NI has been looking for ways to affect overall interest in science and engineering education for many years. They have been lobbying politicians and beating the drum, and when you do that, pretty soon you bump into FIRST and realize you have very similar goals. Perhaps you should join them instead of trying to replicate their success. NI assisted Tufts and LEGO in producing RoboLab about a decade ago, and has been upping the ante as opportunities arise. This is of course not pure philanthropy since a world where engineering and science are celebrated is a world to look forward to.

Finally, a donation of products to FIRST grants exposure. If the products are lame, then everyone exposed will know just how lame -- not a good investment. If the products rock, ..., so any supplier to FIRST is risking far more than a bit of coin.

Greg McKaskle

[Kevin Sevcik]

As Greg pointed out, the excessively large figure would result from buying everything you needed to use a cRIO like you would with the new control system, assuming no discounts whatsoever. NI heavily discounts software for academic institutions, however. To the tune of 50-75%, so it wouldn't be quite that prohibitively expensive for a team to buy everything, provided they convinced the school district to buy it and the team provided the funds. This also goes to art's comment on NI's motives. They "lose" gobs and gobs of money every year selling software to universities, but I'm certain they pretty easily recoup those costs from convincing less programming savvy mechies and chemies that LabView is the way to go.

[Ellery]

Originally Posted by dlavery

Again, that would not be the case. For example, NASA has used the IFI hardware in the development of several prototype applications. A careful perusal of this Gigapan image will reveal one example.

.

Dave,

I must say I am jealous of your lab. Mine is so not photogenically interesting. Just a couple of big boxes with paper and Images flying by at 2 mph.

Ellery