Hey guys! We were a rookie team last year, so I was wondering, do the Kit Of Parts change much every year? Should we expect the motors to be the same, or does that kind of stuff change every year? Thanks for the anwers.
The real answer is, we don’t know. But…
The KOP doesn’t change all that much in the motor department. Sure, there are some changes (drill motors left in 2005, big CIMS in 2007), but it’s relatively constant. Then again, the designers can change that…
You never really know for sure until January, as the KOP is one thing that they do their best to keep under wraps as much as possible. I actually had a a discussion with the KoP engineer at FIRST last week, and it boils down to a few things:
-Control system - the one thing that we really know for sure…we know it is changing for this year.
-Motors - most of these usually stay the same, with the possibility of 1-2 changes a year usually…a lot of the motors are either donations, or highly reduced cost items from suppliers(surplus, etc.) So, if a motor was donated one year, but not the next, you most likely won’t see it in the kit again.
-Odds and ends - there’s certain things that they try to get into the kit every year, but the details aren’t always worked out until later.
They try to get everything finalized by October or so, but there are times where something will get added at the last minute. They are literally collecting tons of materials for all the kits…one fun statistic they mentioned is that if they collected all the wire included in everybody’s kits, it would circle the earth 500+ times (going from memory on that one, so those numbers might not be exactly right, but it was some extremely large number, i know that much)…
If there were 1500 FRC teams in 2008, and they received enough wire to circle the earth 500 times, each team would have received nearly 44 million feet of wire! I think the figure 1/500 times around the earth, with each team receiving about 175 feet of wire, sounds more reasonable.
Anyway, any team that has hauled home the KOP can believe the part about “tons of materials.”
The main thing to keep in mind is that FIRST does NOT want teams designing their competition robots before Kickoff, so usually they keep everything secret. The 2009 control system is the only exception I know of. (I assume everyone has seen the threads about that.)