Team 221 LLC. Universal Chassis In Stock

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Kit or not, you can buy separate parts so you could break it down on the BOM. This leads to a question though, Team A buys a gearbox from Company B but they find the components to the gearbox cheaper from a different supplier. Team A is somehow over the 3500 budget, could they list the components from the suppliers instead of the gearbox from Company B? Just curious.

Per 2008's <R21>, it's the cost of the things "used in the construction" of the robot. If you bought B's gearbox, you can't quote C's price for the same thing. Raw materials, however, may be prorated based on other suppliers' prices, due to <R22> via 8.3.3.1.

This got me thinking about the Team 221 chassis in general. Based upon 8.3.3.1 and the requirements for recording costs on the BOM, I can't see any legitimate way to claim that the $900 chassis is not a single item. We can't claim that every little piece (nut, bolt, plate, sprocket, etc.) of a COTS assembly is an item for BOM purposes, because the rules stipulate that we use "the purchase price" (not the price that we could have paid for a subpart alone). And the same goes for subassemblies: if the purchase price was $900 for the kit, then it wasn't (separately) $400 for the frame rails, and an additional $100 for the crossmembers, plus $400 for the wheel kits. (<R22>, via the last bullet of 8.3.3.1, reinforces this.)

My suggestion is simple: instead of adding a single $900 item to the invoice, just add the three constituent subassemblies to the invoice instead. Then you've got an <R21>- and <R22>-compliant modular system, with individual modules bought separately.

I also realize that at inspection, this would probably be treated leniently, for the sake of the team showing up with the chassis. That doesn't change the fact that the current price structure is a fundamentally incorrect way to account for the parts, according to the 2008 rules, and that offering the entire kit like this may violate some of the (debatably appropriate) philosophical principles described in the rules.

Now, with all of that said, there's an alternative that might work instead (though I certainly don't recommend it). Instead of making it a COTS part, make it a custom order. I don't think a team is prohibited from making a custom order for a box of potentially-COTS parts, under non-COTS terms. They are, after all, shipped unassembled, and many of the individual parts are not available separately from Team 221 LLC. This is a violation of the same principles as above, but is apparently not prohibited by the letter of the rules: it's therefore up to you whether you think it's appropriate. If you were to do this, you would charge whatever you wanted (with no part individually over $400), and the team would list your cost for materials, plus the price of your labour. The most perverse part of this is that by offering something on custom rather than COTS terms, there are no vendor requirements.

I hope that FIRST is revising the parts usage rules for next year, to simplify and clarify these and other issues....