**FIRST EMAIL**/Game Pieces Available

[Mark McLeod]

Greetings Teams:

Game pieces for the 2009 FRC Game were chosen with the expectation/understanding that they would be readily available to teams from WalMart. Unfortunately, we recently learned that WalMart decided to discontinue this item. Remaining Orbit Balls are only available through WalMart stores in the US and are not available online.

FIRST will make our surplus of Orbit Balls available for sale to teams through www.logoloc.com/first/ starting noon Eastern Time on Friday, January 9th, 2009.

Orbit Balls will be sold as a set of 3 for $27.00 per set plus shipping and handling. Each team may purchase only one set. (We have limited quantities available. FIRST may allow teams to purchase additional sets in the future, depending on inventory levels. We will notify teams if additional sets become available.) The only color available is orange/purple (moon rocks).

Order soon, when they’re gone, they’re gone.

Go Teams!

[Kims Robot]

:*(

So any chance there are 40 teams that want to come to the Rochester Rally (our Preship Scrimmage)??? (assuming each team brings 3 balls...)

[Kyle]

Its great they are selling the balls now, but only 3?! I don't thing that anyone can properly build and design with only 3 of any game piece. But its better then nothing..

[Lowfategg]

............................. I can say nothing more.

This year is really something else.

[smurfgirl]

Yaaay! We can stop raiding the country's Walmarts now. (:

[MrForbes]

Or....we could keep raiding the country's Walmarts, and then those teams that have sufficient balls from local sources could "unclaim" the 3 balls that FIRST has reserved for them, and let other teams purchase them?

[NorviewsVeteran]

Originally Posted by Kyle

Its great they are selling the balls now, but only 3?! I don't thing that anyone can properly build and design with only 3 of any game piece. But its better then nothing..

4, one came in the kit

[ggoldman]

Instead of worrying about the lack of resources, try looking at it from a different perspective.

When a NASA roboticist designs a gripper to grab onto moon rocks, they do not have many moon rocks available to actually use to test their design. Instead, they know the design specifications of what they will work with. From that they model their situation and perform multiple simulations.

They only have "one round" when they ship off to the moon. We are VERY lucky in the sense that we have access to AT LEAST 3 of the objects we will manipulate.

Take this on as a challenge and don't worry, because in the end everyone will be knowledgeable and inspired after the build season..and that is one of the goals of the competition!

[Akash Rastogi]

[sarcasm]SWEET! 4 WHOLE BALLS! YES![/sarcasm]

Well, remember this isn't FIRST's fault entirely. They did not know of Wal Mart's intentions.

[smurfgirl]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

[sarcasm]SWEET! 4 WHOLE BALLS! YES![/sarcasm]

Are you kidding? It's like... 4 times the fun!

[cabbagekid2]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

[sarcasm]SWEET! 4 WHOLE BALLS! YES![/sarcasm]

Well, remember this isn't FIRST's fault entirely. They did not know of Wal Mart's intentions.

They didn't know of Walmrt's intentions, but you'd think that...FIRST SHOULD BE THE ONE TO LET Walmart know of THEIR intentions to use a ball which is distributed soley by Walmart. Or even check with the manufactuer to see the status of the product.

*sigh* sorry, had to rant

[kgzak]

We found 5 of them at our walmart. Now we have 2 of each ball.

[likeapolygraph]

I think that more than likely you will be dealing with broken orbit balls on the field anyways so you might as well try working with your robot with broken ones as well as unbroken ones...otherwise if you don't want them breaking then just try not to break them. Many of the ones that our team acquired were already broken anyways but we bought as many as we could because we decided not to wait until they were completely unavailable. We decided to deal with broken ones as they come.

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

Well, remember this isn't FIRST's fault entirely. They did not know of Wal Mart's intentions.

Really? When you're going to cause 2000 teams to want to buy 10-20 or more balls each, you'd better be sure that the only supplier of these balls is actually going to keep supplying them and will have a large enough quantity. As cabbagekid2 said, FIRST should have told the manufacturer and supplier what was going to happen. The small chance of potential damage caused by a leak is worth the huge pain that teams are facing now. How is a team supposed to design, build, and test a robot capable of holding 20 balls if they only have 4?

This is a pretty large 'oops' by FIRST.

[Katie_UPS]

Originally Posted by Mike Soukup

Really? When you're going to cause 2000 teams to want to buy 10-20 or more balls each, you'd better be sure that the only supplier of these balls is actually going to keep supplying them and will have a large enough quantity. As cabbagekid2 said, FIRST should have told the manufacturer and supplier what was going to happen. The small chance of potential damage caused by a leak is worth the huge pain that teams are facing now. How is a team supposed to design, build, and test a robot capable of holding 20 balls if they only have 4?

This is a pretty large 'oops' by FIRST.

Originally Posted by Kyle

Its great they are selling the balls now, but only 3?! I don't thing that anyone can properly build and design with only 3 of any game piece. But its better then nothing..

Originally Posted by cabbagekid2

They didn't know of Walmrt's intentions, but you'd think that...FIRST SHOULD BE THE ONE TO LET Walmart know of THEIR intentions to use a ball which is distributed soley by Walmart. Or even check with the manufactuer to see the status of the product.

*sigh* sorry, had to rant

You know, last year's game peice was pretty much unobtainable last year, and I think having one was enough. For '07, having more than two was plenty. As long as you can do a basic test, you shouldn't complain.

As I've heard in the other threads, the orbit balls were on clearance for months. Which means BLIP Toys has prolly stopped making them for even longer. Which means FIRST would've have to give a warning about a year in advanced to prepare the two suppliers.