FRC Blogged - Team Counts, Kit of Parts Drive System Option, Windows 8
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Blog Date: **Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 12:53
Team Counts
As of 10AM EST on Monday, 10/22, we had 2,166 teams registered or waitlisted for events. That’s a little more than 18% greater than where we were last season at this point in the registration process. Note that 2,166 is a larger number than is showing on our ‘What Events and Teams Are In My Area?’ page on website right now, because this page only shows teams registered for events, not those waitlisted.
Kit of Parts Drive System Option
689 veteran teams took advantage of the option to receive an AndyMark Product Donation Voucher in place of the standard Kit of Parts Drive System for the 2013 season. Over 100 of those requests for the PDV came during the ‘extended deadline’ period, via email. We’ll be including questions about this option in our Kit of Parts survey at the end of the season so we can find out how this change worked for teams.
Windows 8
The software we’re releasing for the 2013 season hasn’t been certified to work with Windows 8. This doesn’t mean it won’t work, just that we can’t guarantee it, and we won’t be able to provide anything beyond cursory support if you decide to use it. We will be incorporating testing with Windows 8 in future seasons.
I was a bit surprised at how few veteran teams took advantage of the vouchers, but it confirmed one of my worries. Judging by the conversations on Chief Delphi, the vast majority of teams were looking to go the voucher route.
To me, this speaks to the types of teams that frequent (and post on) chiefdelphi. Maybe I have a skewed view of the past, but it seems like back in the day ev-ry-body was active on this website.
We have not reached the point where we can design a custom base. So we use the kitframe every year. We don’t always use the KOP gearbox’s but you never know.
Every year we tell the students to go to CD and read and post and interact, but few ever do.
Generally, conversations often only include people who are really interested in a topic - in this case, people who saw that voucher option and seriously considered it. I know for my team, we saw the option and immediately decided against the voucher (thus it wasn’t a point of interest for any of us). We’ve had great success with the KoP chassis, and while the one time we did our own chassis was successful, we realized that the process of doing our own chassis ate up too much time and offered very little benefit over the KoP system.
Also keep in mind that, even if every team is represented here on CD, many, many people aren’t as obsessed about robotics as those who post on here year round. Those others will follow CD during the season to see what people are doing and to ask questions pertaining to the game and their robot. You don’t really have those questions to draw people here in the off season.
We are going with the voucher. We do not design our own custom base and have used the KOP chassis since it was introduced. But we like the VEX chassis better. So we are buying a VEX chassis and will use the PDV to procure the things we usually buy from AM.
We opted to stick with the KoP base, even if we end up modifying it significantly. We’re going to have a relatively young group of students next year and wanted to stick with something quick and easy.
I am curious about what pulleys are going to be provided with the KoP drivebase this year. It’s a “dead axle” drive frame, but I don’t know of any gates pulleys that have a bolt pattern to match the AM wheels.
We declined the voucher since we train rookies.
We wanted to get what they got, because of the change to belt drive.
We plan to experiment with the belts, and play with variations and modifications for rookies, but probably won’t be using them ourselves this season.
Next year we’d probably take the voucher if it’s offered.
We also declined the voucher because of the rookie training issue, both rookie team members on our own team and rookie teams that we are working with.
Because of this, in spite of the fact that we did not use a single piece of the kit drivetrain last year, and have run belt drivetrains for the last two years, we felt that it was best to get the kit pieces.
Even though we probably will not use much of the kit again this year, we have a large influx of new students on the team this year, and we wanted the kit so that they could take part in the “quick-build” at kickoff. It will give them something that moves right away to help them visualize and prototype new ideas.
Ditto for us. We’ve been running custom chassis and drivetrains since 2010, but that doesn’t mean we never use the KoP stuff. In fact, it’s awesome for exactly the quick building you mention. And, we estimate its purchase value at $600+, which last I checked is bigger than $450.