Does anyone know how much approximately the tote costs? We are planning our team’s choices here now, thinking about next year. Yep, I know that the checklist isn’t available yet for the 2024 season.
It does not cost additional money.
It comes in place of vouchers.
I’m guessing that you’re trying to figure out if the black tote is worth more to you than the vouchers that you get in place of it. That’s a difficult question to answer. Generally, for a veteran team that has a lot of previous KoP items still in stock, the answer is that the vouchers are worth more since you can use them on whatever you may need. But, if you still don’t have much in the way of CIM motors and other standard KoP items hanging around (which many newer teams do not) then the black tote may be worth it to you, especially if you still use those kind of parts.
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Nice!
Do the vouchers already cover the shipping cost of the products or you need to pay extra?
The vouchers are used like gift cards for REV and AndyMark- you use them to buy whatever products you want and you can pay for shipping with them.
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As @Ryan_Blue says, you can use the voucher to pay for the shipping of anything you buy with it, but it’s still whatever extra cost shipping is to where you are. Unfortunately for your team, that means shipping from Indiana or Texas to Brazil, which will likely eat up some of the value of those vouchers.
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I will say this - most of the Turkish teams find the vouchers entirely useless due to shipping and customs - and we deal with basically the same problems your team would deal with 
And your customs taxes are higher than ours IIRC
And just in case you are curious how much customs will come out on the kit of parts - it was usually ±$600 while being taxed at ±19%
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I wonder if there is any provision for the vouchers going far over seas to be transferred to teams that can use them? Extra stuff for rookies? Other teams able to purchase the vouchers and make a donation to the team that can’t effectively make any use of them?
I haven’t heard of anything. And even more so, we tried transferring some of our vouchers to a US team that could make use of them a few years ago and we were told they were non-transferrable even to other FRC teams.
Easy to get around that, just spend the voucher on their behalf and use their shipping information.
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It would be nice if the kit was just fully usable to teams abroad, especially in places less fortunate than the U.S., and where parts availability is a nightmare.
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+1 to this, I’ve traded the vouchers and virtual KOP stuff plenty of times in the past.
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The black tote vouchers or $250. The tote often comes with a battery, a couple CIMs, some wire, a set of battery leads. No guaranty any of this will be in it this year. The mostly useful thing consistently in it is the … tote. $250 is probably a good trade for most teams that don’t have high shipping costs. This year is supposed to include some parts for everybot, but don’t expect a full mechanism.
You Get $450 for the KOP chassis. Retail cost of the Chassis is closer to $800 so that is not as good of a deal if you have use of a chassis. Even if you don’t use the chassis on your competition robot it makes a great off season training project.
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Something else to consider for a team like us (20+ years old) is that we have received many a kit of parts, have received several copies of things from the black totes which we aren’t always using, and have basically run out of room for new totes. So there is a cost associated with receiving the black tote and figuring out where to put it all.
This is true, but also Tote Bot. Have newbies build those using the extra materials. If they fail, they learned and you scrap the broken tote and damaged parts. If they succeed you get a new demo/training bot every year and you could toss/donate the old one to a new rookie team to learn from
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