pic: Team 221 LLC. - Wild Swerve Module

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by CraigHickman

I'm going to catch flak for this. I don't care.

What a day it will be when instead of engineering and designing our robots, we'll all go out and buy our parts from our favorite manufacturer, and bolt the pieces together. If we wanted an erector set competition with everything simply to build, we'd be doing Vex. Remind me how buying a pre-designed machine will teach my students how to CAD, design around many variables, and fabricate/test a system? Oh wait, it won't.

As an engineer if you are assigned to design X product, which requires components A, B, C, D etc.... and you choose to design, prototype, test, pay for manufacture, etc... of all the components when suitable COTS items are available, you will be fired.

The cost of buying component B could literally be 1/10th to 1/100th the cost of designing and making it (or outsourcing production) in house.

It's the system that matters, not the individual components.