Creating and selling parts.

[Billfred]

(DISCLAIMER: This is from my own mind, and is not endorsed by any team or FIRST or whatever.)

I was just trying to think of a fundraising thing, and it hit me.

Suppose team pi realized that they make a mean competition port dongle. Suppose further that they need to raise some money to get registered and such. Would making a few dozen/hundred/gajillion dongles and then selling them be a good thing or a bad thing for FIRST? FIRST teams?

(Friendly reminder: There are people outside of FIRST who use IFI systems like ours. Robot combat, largely, but I imagine other fields use it as well.)

[Tristan Lall]

Maybe a dongle is a bad example. It isn't much more than a straight wire (to enable channel select) and two wires with switches (for autonomous and kill). If teams merely look at the pinout guide, they can make their own very, very easily indeed. (For channel select only, a paperclip is good.)

And of course, IFI could change the specification, leaving you with several (several "gajillion"?) useless parts.

Are you thinking more along the lines of Andy Baker's standardized gearboxes, in terms of a final plan?

[Billfred]

I didn't even know A-money was standardizing gearboxes. But for the sake of argument, yeah.

[Jim S]

I had a the same idea for a fundraiser ,I was thinking of a 2 speed tranny kit that would consist of a gears, bearing,shafts,instuctuction,software and a real sweet cnc housing to mount everything into.I thought it could designed with the abilty to have different motor configurations (ie. one drill ,drill and chip or just the chip maybe even the tyco with another motor) I thought this could be a great teaching tool and alot of fun to assemble.This tranny should also have a good encoder also built into it monitor the output shaft.And the software should include manual shift or full auto shift. I think if someone sell 200 unit the price would not be that much maybe $150 a set .

jim schaddelee
team 107 mentor

[Joe Ross]

I would be willing to pay for a well made dongle (ie, better then I can make myself).

696 sells 25' serial cables for about the same price as I could get from the distributor we use at work (and much better then at your standard computer store). I've bought from them to help support their team.

[dez250]

Dongles would be a great fundraiser but before you put your effort into building dongles to do as a fundraiser, i know of a couple groups that are working on mass producing dongles as a handout. Just a little heads up...

[Jon K.]

Originally Posted by Billfred

(DISCLAIMER: This is from my own mind, and is not endorsed by any team or FIRST or whatever.)

I was just trying to think of a fundraising thing, and it hit me.

Suppose team pi realized that they make a mean competition port dongle. Suppose further that they need to raise some money to get registered and such. Would making a few dozen/hundred/gajillion dongles and then selling them be a good thing or a bad thing for FIRST? FIRST teams?

(Friendly reminder: There are people outside of FIRST who use IFI systems like ours. Robot combat, largely, but I imagine other fields use it as well.)

Rage is looking into something similar, only we are thinking about doing aluminum sprockets with our new cnc machine. If anyone has any feedback on this idea and would be interested in seeing something like this happen please PM me.

[miketwalker]

I personally think it's a great thing to do in general. It can save time for teams (especially rookies) who don't really know what to do for something. I know many teams don't have the best of dongles... and I know other ideas were like trannys and sprockets and such... and I mean, many teams don't have the facilities/amount of people to do things like transmissions. If another team has a good thing to sell... I think it's great cause it's win-win, the team recieving gets something they may not be able to do themselves as well and has another team or teams to talk to if something breaks for support, and the team creating it of course gets the funding. Both teams also become close and form a network from the transaction, and cooperating is what FIRST is all about. Working with another team like that can only help make relationships between those teams better.

[Matt Adams]

I think that this is a GREAT idea. You're building something that is useful for other teams while doing some fundraising. Students are hopefully using and building skills. There's a few concerns that I should note:

Quality Assurance: Would you completely trust an integral drivetrain component out of a box build by another team as opposed to a company?

Longevity: Teams could ruin thier reputation by providing seemingly functional components that don't hold up over the course of a season.

Those are the two ideas that popped into my head immediately. I think you'd have to approach this idea with caution. However, if you wanted to manufacturing some 80/20 like brackets... that's an undertapped market.

All done.

Matt

[Jim S]

I cant agree with you more, but maybe this could be a project to teach kids how a company takes products to market. they could do market research ,quality planning,testing and a marketing plan. This would take alot of work. A tranny might be a multi team project.

jim chaddelee
team 107 mentor

[Gary Dillard]

I love this question - let me open it up a little more for the big philisophical debate...I see 3 questions here.

1) At what point does the fund raiser part exceed gracious professionalism? Recall the big cheezy-poofs / Kingman collaberation debate last year - people weighed in on both sides. I posted in favor of it and it appears FIRST embraced it, so I think we'll see much more of teams working together to share the load. But when we're talking about selling rather than giving does that change the attitude? If our team has excess resources and I choose to sell them rather than donate or exchange them, does that make me a bad guy? Is it different for little team alpha who doesn't have excess resources and is using the funds to break even, versus big team beta who is fully funded and supported and is selling it to buy nicer team jackets?

2) Why is hardware treated differently than intellectual property? We see white papers all the time with detail drawings of tranny's, autonomous code, etc. - but what if team delta (or team engineer Joe Delta) said "we'll sell our tranny design for $100"? Are we expected to share designs for free since there's no intrinsic expense? If we're promoting engineering, why are we expected to give our product (the design) away as if it had no value?

3) What's wrong with individuals/companies selling stuff for a profit, not just as a fund raiser? That's how Innovation First started, sounds like Andy Baker is working towards it on gearboxes, if the market supports it, why not?

I'll answer my own questions later on, but what do you think?

[Billfred]

1) I don't think it changes the attitude...to a point. If your team exerted labor in the production of something, then go ahead and ask for some cash, maybe even a few bucks over cost. If it's something your team bought, whatever it cost the team. Kit parts, I'd say, oughta go for shipping-ish. It all comes down to whatever the two teams hash out, but that seems like a vague guideline.

2) I guess this is one of the points where FIRST differs with reality. We've got this everyone-wants-to-help-everyone scenario in FIRST, which isn't exactly what you've got going in the real world. The designs have value, it's just that everyone thus far seems to have given them away. If someone were to ask a few bucks for a white paper, you'd be looked at funny (only because it's not as expected in FIRST), and you might not have much success, but that's your right. (Just thinking out loud, perhaps teams should put in a thing such as "This document is free to FIRST teams, but may not be used outside of FIRST without the author's permission.")

3) Well, fundraisers tend to be for profit anyway--the profits just benefit teams. But if it's your design, and you think you can sell it to folks and make that money, go for it. I don't think anyone's going to fault your team for trying to make an honest dollar.

[Lil' Lavery]

I see a potential problem with this. If enough teams started to sell enough different parts, FIRST could basically become who can buy the best parts type of thing. If a certain team had the money, they could buy team a's frame, team b's tranny, team c's arm, ect. and end up all they do is a few modifications to the frame to fit the parts, and bolting them together. There's a difference between manufacturing parts a team cant make as a mentor, and buying parts. Plus, the fundraiser would be hard anyway, if the other team wanted to actually use them in the competition, sense all their parts have to be made during the build season, they fundraising team would have to basically become an assembly line to make any profit.

[Billfred]

You've hit the big thing--building the bigger parts of the robot in a six-week timespan is hard to impossible. Therefore, it can't really get that big, unless a team decides not to build a robot that year. And no team is going to do that.

However, things like the OI remain unregulated by and large. So if a team wanted to build good strong control boards for the OI with plenty of expandability (such as adding switches), then we're getting somewhere.

[Pierson]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I see a potential problem with this. If enough teams started to sell enough different parts, FIRST could basically become who can buy the best parts type of thing. If a certain team had the money, they could buy team a's frame, team b's tranny, team c's arm, ect. and end up all they do is a few modifications to the frame to fit the parts, and bolting them together. There's a difference between manufacturing parts a team cant make as a mentor, and buying parts. Plus, the fundraiser would be hard anyway, if the other team wanted to actually use them in the competition, sense all their parts have to be made during the build season, they fundraising team would have to basically become an assembly line to make any profit.

What's wrong with this? What if there is a new team which has very little knowledge, 1 or 2 mentors, and a very small budget? I would have no problem letting a team assemble their robot from parts that other teams sold, I see this as a win-win situation. Isn't this why FIRST stopped being so detailed on what parts we can use? Once the team becomes more advanced, they would most likely begin to create their own parts.

Originally Posted by Billfred

You've hit the big thing--building the bigger parts of the robot in a six-week timespan is hard to impossible. Therefore, it can't really get that big, unless a team decides not to build a robot that year. And no team is going to do that.

Help me here... maybe I have read this wrong... But if your team is "acting" like a "company" in the you send us $$$ and we send you a part, why wouldn't the "team" (aka company) be able to take orders and mass produce the parts before the season started? Then on the Saturday the season starts, take the boxes of parts to UPS and ship them all out.

Then the team has a couple of options, "buy" one of their own parts that was previously made (though that could get dicey) or just make another one with all the experience they have.

Yes? No?