FRC Blogged - An Early Option

[Jon Stratis]

I'm surprised this wasn't up yet...

Blog Date:
Thursday, October 25, 2012 - 15:21

I’ve got some news I think many teams will be happy with.

As more Kit of Parts items shift from the Kickoff Kit to FIRST® Choice and the Virtual Kit (e.g. Product Donation Vouchers, PDVs), teams will receive fewer items in the Kickoff Kit each year, but have a wider variety and volume of items from which to choose that may meet their specific needs better. However, the added flexibility of FIRST Choice and PDV’s mean that teams may need to plan a little extra time for part selection and shipping.

To help teams plan and prepare for the season, FIRST Choice and select Virtual Kit items will be available before Kickoff. Some items in FIRST Choice are game specific, so those will only be available after Kickoff.

Release details for this early release plan are as follows:

November 12

FIRST Choice opens for “window shopping”

December 10

FIRST Choice opens for orders
Altium Designer software download active
Autodesk Inventor software download active
PTC creo software download active
AndyMark PDV active (voucher is for $450 and active only for those Teams that opted out of the drive base kit for 2013)
BaneBots PDV active (voucher is for $35 for specific items to be revealed on December 10)
DigiKey PDV active (voucher is for $25 for any DigiKey item)
Inventables PDV active (voucher is for $20 for any Inventables item)
Innovation First PDV active (voucher is for the items listed below)

two motor controllers (Jaguar and/or Victor),
one 2-Wire Motor 393,
one Motor Controller 29, and
one 2-Wire Extension F/F cable.

Early FIRST Choice and Virtual Kit orders are only available to 2013 FRC Teams that have registered and paid. Team specific access codes will be made live available in the team’s TIMS account on December 10. If a team registers and/or pays after this date, the codes will become live in the team’s TIMS account once payment is confirmed.

I’ll blog again soon.

Frank

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...log-10-25-2012

[Jon Stratis]

I've sent in the following questions to the blog post, as I don't think this was sufficiently clear:

1. If a team wants to get a game piece, for example, do they have to wait for their entire order until after kick-off? Can they purchase a generic "game piece" item pre kick-off, and have that portion shipped after kick-off? Can they place a partial order early, then the rest later?
2. For the PDV's, will there be any indication on legal parts prior to December 10? For example, which BB motors will be legal this year, or will the new Victor 888 be legal?

[Chris is me]

I'm a little confused as to how FIRST expects teams to be ready to order parts before knowing what their robot is going to even roughly look like. Won't this just encourage people to start "pre-building"?

[bardd]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I'm a little confused as to how FIRST expects teams to be ready to order parts before knowing what their robot is going to even roughly look like. Won't this just encourage people to start "pre-building"?

I agree that it'll be hard to order before the game is released, but some things never change. You would always need batteries, for example.
Also, you can deduce some properties of the game by FIRST Choice's part list, though ordering these parts in advanced might be a dangerous strategy. The chassis lifters in the list this year were a sign of a passable buffer of some sort.
Finally, you may have to re-stock, if you lost some important parts during the offseason (or the season itself even).

About "pre-building", I don't think we'll see teams pre-ordering to get an early lead. Most teams will understand the high risks in pre-building, I believe. Also, this being not very GP (in mi mind for the very least) might deter some of the teams who won't.

[BigJ]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I'm a little confused as to how FIRST expects teams to be ready to order parts before knowing what their robot is going to even roughly look like. Won't this just encourage people to start "pre-building"?

I think it's more a calculated risk between having what you usually use with no lead time during build season vs. using your voucher credit on stuff you didn't end up needing. With regards to pre-building it's just another "trust people", like telling the turth on your bag sheet, actually staying under the withholding allowance, etc.

[Nemo]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I'm a little confused as to how FIRST expects teams to be ready to order parts before knowing what their robot is going to even roughly look like. Won't this just encourage people to start "pre-building"?

This is perhaps partly true, but I think the overall effect is to give teams a new choice. If you want to wait until you know more to be sure you can use the stuff you choose, you can wait until the game is released. If you want to stock up to save a bit of time during the season, you can select generally useful stuff before the season.

For our part, I think we'll take advantage of the early $450 AndyMark voucher to buy some drive parts to have ready on day 1. Then if the game dictates a completely different drive than the one we gambled on, we'll either a) make it work anyway or b) eat the extra cost to build a different drive.

Overall I like the ability to pre-buy to reduce our exposure to a potential early supply crunch / backorder delay at AndyMark on certain parts.

[Jon Stratis]

Teams can also narrow down the list pretty easily. For example, our team always uses the maximum number of CIM motors (4), and we only get 2 in the KoP. If CIM's are available, we might as well pick up 2 more. We'll gladly take new batteries, and one of our multimeters isn't working too well anymore (even with a fresh battery), so we'll take one off First Choice this year to replace it. Since we never use Pneumatics (and have very little expertise on it within the team), we can take a risk to eliminate all of those options, and just pay the price later in the highly unlikely event that we change our minds.

The big question is on game-specific items. We'd love to get some additional game pieces (assuming each robot manipulates multiple game pieces in a game... if it's a track ball like overdrive, we really only need 1), but you won't know that until January. Do we need to wait on the rest of our order because we aren't sure on this one item? Can we spend half of our points early, and save the other half for game-specific items later?

[maddoctor90]

I really like the idea of being able to use the product vouchers early. We pre-order certain parts that we use every year on the robot like (batteries, aluminum, cim motors, etc). This will allow us to buy many of these parts with the vouchers instead of trying to figure out what to use them for during the build season.

[dtengineering]

Hopefully this will allow overseas teams to receive much of their KoP in time for it to be useful for the build season.

While this is a non-issue for American teams, and a minor issue for Canadian teams, it is a big issue for many of our international colleagues, some of whom did not receive their KoP until several weeks into the build season.

Jason

[Tottanka]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Hopefully this will allow overseas teams to receive much of their KoP in time for it to be useful for the build season.

While this is a non-issue for American teams, and a minor issue for Canadian teams, it is a big issue for many of our international colleagues, some of whom did not receive their KoP until several weeks into the build season.

Jason

Exactly.
And wer'e gonna use that early order 100%.

[Donut]

Originally Posted by Nemo

This is perhaps partly true, but I think the overall effect is to give teams a new choice. If you want to wait until you know more to be sure you can use the stuff you choose, you can wait until the game is released. If you want to stock up to save a bit of time during the season, you can select generally useful stuff before the season.

For our part, I think we'll take advantage of the early $450 AndyMark voucher to buy some drive parts to have ready on day 1. Then if the game dictates a completely different drive than the one we gambled on, we'll either a) make it work anyway or b) eat the extra cost to build a different drive.

Overall I like the ability to pre-buy to reduce our exposure to a potential early supply crunch / backorder delay at AndyMark on certain parts.

We have the same sentiment. 167 has really liked using mecanum drivetrains the past few seasons and there's a high probability we will use one again this year. We might as well order the parts for it ahead of time so we aren't waiting until week 3 to have parts for a drive base. Is there a chance it will be a suboptimal choice for the game? Yes, in which case we'll make due. But the advantage of being able to build and iterate quicker if we do use the system seems worth it to me.

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I'm a little confused as to how FIRST expects teams to be ready to order parts before knowing what their robot is going to even roughly look like. Won't this just encourage people to start "pre-building"?

Chris, I think you're underestimating the magnitude of what's going on here.

Sure, FIRST isn't telling us the game objective and they're not releasing the entire KOP. Yes, it may cause teams to pre-build and perhaps waste a bunch of time with a system - but I believe these teams will know the risk they are taking when they decide to pre-build.

But in reality, this is nothing but a good thing - IMO. At least now we'll know what speed controllers are legal, some of the legal motors, and I'm sure a bunch of other handy parts as well. Look at the motors specifically, if there are a bunch of 500-series motors in the KOP again, now a team can purchase low risk (often the most used and often out of stock) parts like pinion gears, small reduction transmissions, etc. In the case of speed controllers, this is a perfect opportunity for a team to say "Well, the 884, the Jaguar, XXXX and ZZZZ are legal this year. We need some new speed controllers, so let's look at our options now and stock up."

The software is really neat too, having it available ~4 weeks prior to Kick-Off gives teams more than enough time to upgrade their software and get accustomed to it - instead of having to do it in week one or two of build.

Needless to say, I'm really happy about this. I think it's a big step in the right direction.

[MichaelBick]

Sorry for repeating a question if it was already askedu. Do we know if items bought with the voucher will be considered KOP?

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by MICHAELABICK

Sorry for repeating a question if it was already askedu. Do we know if items bought with the voucher will be considered KOP?

2013 rules will decide this for sure, but the 2012 manual says:

[R10]
The Kit of Parts (KOP) is the collection of items obtained via any of the following KOP channels:
Via the Kickoff Kit (items are listed in the 2012 Kickoff Kit Checklist),
Via the Virtual Kit (details on the Kit of Parts website),
and via FIRST Choice.

The Virtual Kit was defined on the FIRST website as:

Virtual Kit – these items are available to teams directly from the supplier either via download or custom order. The list of participating suppliers includes:
Product Donation Vouchers
-Automotive Recyclers Association - use your PDV to get additional motors for your robot
-BaneBots - use your team's code in TIMS to get BaneBots items
-DigiKey - use your PDV to get DigiKey parts
-Inventables - use your PDV to get Inventables parts
Other Free Parts
-Bimba - select up to three pneumatic cylinders using Bimba’s custom order form.
-Gates - request additional free Gates components here.
Software Downloads
-Altium Designer – board design software
-Autodesk – CAD tools (their Kickoff Kit CAD files are available here)
-PTC – CAD tools (their Kickoff Kit CAD files are available here)
-Diamond Bullet Studios - A simulation of the 2012 FRC Game available to all FRC teams.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I'm a little confused as to how FIRST expects teams to be ready to order parts before knowing what their robot is going to even roughly look like. Won't this just encourage people to start "pre-building"?

What can you pre-build that will give you a leg up on other teams?

I see this as good for international teams and taking a load off AM after kickoff when everyone places orders. Most teams already know what they want from FIRST Choice with the exception of game related materials.