New CRIO in the KOP next year?

[dtengineering]

If leaving the cRio out of the KoP allows FIRST to reduce entry fees by $750 (the discounted price of a replacement cRio) then teams would have the option to either pay $6,000 and get a new cRio, or pay $5,250 and re-use their old one.

If FIRST makes replacing the entire control system optional, then entry fees, perhaps could be reduced by even more than the $750 discounted cost of the cRio.

I'm not sure how best to handle entry fees for rookie teams, who don't already have a cRio, as I believe it is important to keep the "entry barrier" to a competition like this as low as possible, however I know that our team, for one, would seriously consider reusing our cRio and modules if it meant saving in the neighbourhood of a thousand bucks.

By the way, we have a fairly modular control board on our robot that weighs about 14 pounds, includes the cRio, sidecars, breaker box, power switch, speed controllers and a couple of spikes that can be attached and detached in, well, probably 10 minutes or so.

Photos of the control board and drive modules are at:

http://www.trobotics.ca/#Build%20Season%202009

Photo 19 shows the control board, 21 shows it hooked up to drive modules, Photo 26 in that gallery probably shows our modular design in its most separated stage, other photos show us weighing the modules (our withholding limit) and the very minimalist package that went in the shipping crate, as we were able to keep the drive modules and control board at home for practice.

Jason