I am pleased to announce the 2018 Winter Design Challenge!
Dates: 12:01AM EST of December 20th thru 11:59PM EST of December 23rd. There will be a live stream on December 29th to showcase the winners of the Design Challenge.
This purpose of this challenge is to accurately prepare students for the 2019 build season by providing tasks for the teams to design a robot for within a set budget.
This design challenge will be judged based upon how well a team fulfills the guidelines set by the challenge. The challenge will be a task list rather than a full FRC game. Each tiers task list will be slightly altered from each other but the tiers will be judged all together. There will be 3 tiers and each tier will have a different budget. The first tier will have a budget of $1000, the second tier will have a budget of $3000 and the third tier will have a budget of $5000. The standard FRC control system will not count against the budget. (PDP, VRM, Rio, Radio, Motor Controllers etc). Everything else counts against the budget including machining operations and stock costs. All teams will be required to submit a Cost Accounting Worksheet to show that they are within their budget.
Teams will be able to use any COTS parts as well as make custom parts. There is a max COTS part cost of $500 per part. Machining costs will be determined based upon the number of holes, pockets and contrours a custom part has, stock will also come at a cost. Machining costs will be released when the design challenge begins.
How would this be different than the CADathon? Because they’re on the same dates, I wanted to send some members to work on the CADathon - any particular reason I’d want to pick yours over it?
Thank you for asking! Unlike the CADathon, this design challenge will not be a full FRC field and manual but rather a task list with the goal of completing as many tasks as possible. There is also the addition of budget rules as well as different budget tiers for teams to compete in. The big thing that we are going for is to make a challenge that pushes teams to design something that their team could design and build in season.
I would be really curious to know the details of this as it essentially drives the entire design challenge at times. This isn’t necessarily a realistic way to cost parts, and certain design styles are going to work far better than others with this model.
The F4 thing had some poll up awhile ago about dates where they settled on these dates. In any case, I doubt any vaguely organized event is picking dates at the moment they’re throwing an announcement on CD.
We wanted to run this competition before build season and the 20th thru the 23rd are the best dates as they don’t fall right before New Years and they don’t fall on what finals for most schools.
We’ve looked at a couple of options for pricing out custom parts and this was the most objective method that we could come up with. If you have a different suggestion please let us know and we’ll consider it.
Correct. We (F4) have had a date completely sorted out within ourselves as well as our other affiliated entities for well over a week. While those dates were the best ones we had for us, I am personally surprised a smaller starting out competition didn’t try pushing their event ahead. We fortunately after 5 previous events have hit the capacity at which it requires about a week to judge submissions at minimum and our dates (and theirs as well) actually coincide a little with many school schedules. If we had our pick and it didn’t take that amount of time to judge we would have definitely done the competition after Christmas like we have done in the past if I recall correctly. TLDR; we plan our CADathons way too far in advance and really have no reason to steal someone’s date.
That said, I’m happy to see another team attempt a crack at a design competition. I just really wish they were on different dates so I could finally maybe possibly compete in one.
Due to a major event coming up in my personal life, I’m going to have to cancel the design challenge for winter. I do plan on running this in the summertime of 2019. If you have any feedback on the concept of the challenge please send it my way.
