**FIRST EMAIL**/FIRST announces pricing for upcoming 2010 FRC season

[Foster]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-2823

says that it's $750 with a discount and $1500 without. 1714 bought a new cRIO at the tail end of this year for programming practice, so this change luckily really doesn't affect us much.

1640 also bought a spare cRio last year for the programming team. Along with a spare digital/analog sidecars and power unit. But if I use it this year in the robot then I don't have one for the programmers. Being a forward looking team then the question becomes what do I use in our 2010 summer?

Dean made big deal of the Parade of Previous Robots to show how designs have changed (and improved) across the year. Hard to do when I have shared cRios. We take our robots out on a regular basis as demo's (three events this summer), it's cool to see two or three of them run at once. We also use them as practice bots, the 2008 robot was the target for our Lunacy testing. The 2007 bot was a great blocker robot in 2008. And so on.

We also are using the spare cRio in building a Swerve Prototype as a practice / pre-engineering robot. So I still need the cRio for next summer.

So for some teams this is a bonus, for us it ends up the same cost as last year. Just another 100 cars to do in our car wash.