I do NOT wish to disparage the individuals and companies who have done so much to make FIRST robotics COTS supplies possible. Large company or small, new or veteran, everything about our robots and their capabilities have been moved massively forward thanks to them, and I am grateful.
Is there anything that we can do differently as a community to adjust our expectations on having products in stock? Shipping parts from overseas, and getting them through customs, have been proven for at least the last several years to take longer than any of us hope. I just hate to think that the folks who are doing everything they can to provide us with amazing new stuff each year are getting grumbled at (or worse) when delays happen.
Some ideas for me to implement myself:
plan on building this year’s robot using only known components that we already have in hand, or with items that are common and easy to get (like bolts and nuts).
change my purchasing cycle to buy new products over the summer, and test them in the fall.
keep my eyes open for teams who need something that we may have, and have good enough control over our inventory that we know how much help we can offer.
I came into this thread being like ugh here we go again but was pleasantly surprised, I think all your ideas are great, maybe we need some community way of implementing " * keep my eyes open for teams who need something that we may have, and have good enough control over our inventory that we know how much help we can offer.". Perhaps some sort of public spreadsheet of teams with things up for offer, or things that are in need?
Hopefully we can keep this thread as ways to help instead of pointing fingers at rules and companies who are trying their best.
I was thinking about something like that too. I bet such a thing already exists? At least on the regional level. I wonder how much of a lift it would be to get one going that can be accessed here on CD.
One way that can facilitate that is if the vendors move the traditional COTS parts release from December to August.
Products could be revealed at IRI, and functioning on robots by Chezy Champs.
I would also like to see FIRST encourage this. Since I expect next year to be an off year for new motors and controllers, what if they took that opportunity to move the release of those up to August for 2025 and beyond? I also hope they allow vendors to decouple the announcement and release of these products so teams can officially know what’s coming before FIRST makes the blog post instead of relying on rumors.
One issue with this is teams don’t tend to buy most items in the off-season. Swerve might be the exception. Demand isn’t created on most items until the game is released.
Move the game release up sooner and keep competitions in the same time frame and you fix a lot of the gold rush / vendor stocking issues in my opinion, in addition to creating a more manageable volume of orders for vendors spread out over time.
For products that require explicit permission from FIRST due to robot rules, such as Motors/Motor Controllers, it falls on FIRST to release the legal motor list earlier in the year and not in the October/November timeframe, which has been the case for the last several years. I don’t blame vendors for waiting until official confirmation before committing the resources to mass produce these to avoid the risk that FIRST decides to update the list at the last minute.
I think it’s fair to say that vendors’ schedules for new products are largely responding to outside forces, including things like the legal motor list mentioned above. And teams are mostly reacting to timing imposed by these same forces. I think teams (mine included) can be more effective in adjusting our schedule and needs to these realities. But it seems like a lot of this stems from the schedules set by FIRST. I know these schedules have been in place for decades now, and honestly they were created for a time when many things were different. There were a lot less teams, there were basically zero bespoke robotics boutique suppliers, etc. Colin and Company at HQ have been demonstrating a willingness to make needed changes to make FIRST sustainable. Maybe this is an important area of improvement?
I don’t know anything about the development cycles of any suppliers, so I could be entirely wrong, but if I had to guess, most of them are busy in-season with product support, shipping orders, and running their own teams, so I’d think product development wouldn’t even start until May or June. From there, it’s only a couple of months until the fall when things ramp up again for off-seasons.
Between season, off-season, manufacturing and shipment time (especially from China), quality control, testing, redesigning, waiting on info from FIRST, and having to guess about what products will be needed, I estimate suppliers get about 3-4 months of proper product development time in a year. This doesn’t even account for development and support of other programs like FTC. Moving their product release to earlier in the fall would likely require products being released the following year, which in the tiny yet picky FRC market is enough time to be too late on entry to the market and missing out to established companies who release sooner.
I maintain that the best way to help suppliers with stock and product development such that teams can get their parts more reliably is for FIRST to give the game information to all major suppliers early on so that they can properly prepare.
Agree with everything said, especially treating the parts constraints as just another design constraint.
Additionally, in a very broad sense… it’s just a high school robotics competition.
I know these issues can feel big. They feel, and sometimes actually are, the biggest issues folks have solved in their life. However, I can say with confidence, they aren’t the biggest issues in the world.
It’s a sign of maturity to be able to self-identify when you’re inflating an issue larger than it actually is. It takes discipline to step back from a stressful situation, and look objectively at it. But, if done properly, it helps you get perspective of what your corner of the world looks like compared to others… which should hopefully bring some solace - you are not alone in your struggles.
Finally, I’ve had the good fortune of meeting many owners of FRCFIRST Robotics Competition supplier companies. I can say, without a single exception - they’re like-minded folks. Passionate about teaching students, and poured their life’s time (and money) into their businesses to further that cause. They’re not getting rich off of this. Especially when they’re up front and honest about stock levels, keep in mind they’re talking to you as peers, not customers to make a fast buck from.
That’s spot on. But… There’s another option: FIRST gives heads-up to vendors: “Hey, we don’t think elevators are going to be all that useful this year, but you are likely going to want to stock up on large wheels, especially if they’re pneumatic.”
I think it’s time to start addressing the elephant in the room that these release and restock dates are starting to break and the teams are getting hurt here.
There’s really only 8 operating days left before the season starts given most companies and suppliers are shut down next week.
Many key components are still not in stock including parts governed by the rule book for control system components. Teams are also now starting to foot the bill on massive pre-orders for key items with lengthy delays pushing into February. That’s one of the worst situations we’ve seen recently given late February means most teams can’t use them in time.
Teams get it. The last thing we want is faulty products or parts that just aren’t there yet… teams also need them to even get them on their robots so they can actually have a season.
We can’t thank these companies enough for helping raise the floor, but the pinch teams are getting now is tough especially when the new meta that COTS is pushing is build faster to keep up. Its tough, but this cycle seems to be getting worse and worse each year and FRC security becoming a game of how much can you spend early enough to secure your team has what they need. That’s a really hard line to tow with teams who don’t have much usable cash and when they do, all the inventory is dried up or not coming for a while.
So I don’t know if this is district, state, or federal level, but our schools budget doesn’t reset till mid July, I wouldn’t want products to release before this otherwise we have no shot at getting our orders in. My vote is Aug as the soonest to shift to for items there might be supply constraints on, otherwise they might sell out before we have our new budget. I’m sure other schools have the same constraints plus it might be harder to place POs over summer break.
This isn’t really how budgets work, though. Most schools, public and private, across the U.S. have a fiscal year that turns over on or around July 1. Budgets are developed months in advance of this date as they have to go through varying levels of approval.
If a product is released in May or June, it’s probably too late to build in extra money to the budget for a specific line item. If a product is released in July or August, it’s definitely too late to build in extra money to the budget for a specific line item.
You can assume each year that there will be some new products released that you’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor want, and you can assume those will be a few percent more than the year before.
Assuming you can anticipate your approximate costs, it shouldn’t matter when you spend the money. If I have $50,000 to spend in the fiscal year, why would I care if I buy $2,500 in motors in June or July or December? I don’t understand this argument.
Brendan, I think we’re agreeing on more things than not (at least from how I’m reading your post). The schedule is bad for everyone, and it cannot continue like this. From what suppliers have shared, they’re not happy about it either. The spirit of this thread is to come up with productive ways to solve the logistics problems. My guess is that the production cycle for suppliers is too short to ensure product reliability, and outside of delaying products for additional years of development, the only thing I can think of to change that system is to give suppliers the tools they need to make accurate stocking information, whether that be through game information or better collaboration between FIRST and suppliers.
With the problem of parts going out of stock, knowing what to stock would be incredibly useful. With the problem of new key products being released too late into the season, maybe there are things that can be done on FIRST’s end to facilitate reliability in the development process. Maybe the solution is “no products are deemed control system legal until you can show us a minimum quantity of product in-hand by some specified date”, but I would be worried that that would either rush production on something that isn’t ready or stop suppliers from investing as much in the control system space.
Outside of control system components, I don’t see this issue cropping up too much. I think we’ve actually seen an improvement of suppliers only releasing components they have on-hand or are about to receive over the past year or so.
Teams not having key products is bad, teams having to rush order and drop hundreds to thousands of dollars just to get a part in time for season is bad, and the current schedule needs to change. I propose that one thing that can be done is FIRST working closer with suppliers. What ideas do you have to help solve the issue?
So for us our primary source of funding is a fixed budget we get every year, so it’s not a matter of increasing or changing the budget, but just the ability to cut a check/PO to actually place the order. We also have to spend our complete budget by the end of May or we lose what ever is left over. If a product like Motor XYZ starts taking orders in June and we can’t put our order in until the end of July, that puts us further in the queue/backlog (assuming there are supply constraints).
For all I know we’re the only ones in this position, I just wanted to throw it out there.