Has there ever been a year that has had more “out of stock” and shipping delays then this year? There has to be a better way for suppliers to ramp up for this “LIMITED BUILD WINDOW”… :ahh:
Remember FIRST, some of us don’t have access to amazing machine shops. 
Yes, last year.
Which is exactly why it’s imperative to work quickly and efficiently. Teams that had well-thought-out designs week 1 and 2 were able to order and ship any needed parts.
FRC is meant to model real life. Too much to do in too little time with not enough money. And things aren’t always where you need them to be.
From the vendor side - this season there is an embarassment of riches as far as motor options go. 22 motors on a robot - that’s crazy! The vendors have no clue what motors will be used by teams - FP or BaneBots or AM or one taken from an Odyssey in the local junkyard. Our vendors are in a niche market - it would be poor business for them to stockpile tons of inventory in the hopes that it will be sold. Every piece of inventory in a warehouse is lost money.
Also, keep in mind that any part the vendor has stock of after the season is over may not be FRC-legal next year. At that point, they’ll have a much harder time getting rid of those extra parts!
While I agree with Taylor’s assessment, I would like to offer another possibile factor:
Perhaps teams with abundant funding began stock-piling gear boxes and motors very early in the season – including spares – to hedge for whatever design they pursue. This type of action would exacerbate a supply shortage and long lead times for re-stock.
From the business world…I get it, but I step out of from there at 5:00p
With gracious professionalism…I am not sympathizing about potentially losing money on inventory…I am charged with helping to make a “well thought out design in week 1” get finished.
While past actions are no definitive proof of future results, the trend of the FRC game manual over the past few seasons has been to expand the potential pool of legal motors, pneumatics, and other components. This year is perfect proof of this, with a wide variety of legal Fisher Price SKUs to choose from. In past seasons, while many of these motors are within a few percent of each other in operating specs, only “that year’s” FP motors were legal.
This is one really awesome aspect of the game rules that I hope they maintain in future seasons.
I know you are trying to get a robot built, but the fact is that we all are. We all have made some design changes and done some engineering of our own to overcome the obstacles.
And just so you know, in a pre-season EWCPcast, Andy Baker let us know that they had an inventory worth approximately $1 million.
Keep some perspective, get through the rough patches of your build by asking around for help.
Wouldn’t it be nice if FIRST shared the game in some level of detail including motor allotments and basic robot rules with common vendors about 4-6 months ahead of the season? Should help the vendors develop new products and properly build stock for the coming game… No need to stock a bunch of Arm transmissions if it’s a ball game, and no need to stock a bunch of ball transmissions if it’s an arm game.
Just a thought.
And not a new one either. It really doesn’t make sense that FIRST keeps all this on the low down until Kickoff, especially after all the friendly suggestions to open things up.
However, I don’t know that this would alleviate the problem as much as we would like. There are a lot of teams that don’t do a thing until Kickoff rolls around, so they would continue buying everything in the build season crunch.
As many have stated, the best thing to do is get your design done sooner rather than later so you’re not in this situation, or so you have time to wait for lead times or to come up with a backup plan.
We ourselves are kind of behind where we would like to be in terms of design, but at the same time we have much more of the robot designed that we did on any of our past robots, at any point. We just have to deal with lead times and part shortages now… And we are fortunate enough to have come custom machining options to fall back on as well.
It wouldn’t affect the teams at all. If the vendors know that such-and-such a motor will be legal and oh, by the way, it’s been pretty popular in the past for applications similar to this year’s game, they can build up an inventory cushion, knowing that there’s a pretty good chance they’ll sell out. This will reduce the lead times to teams, even during the heat of build season, as the vendors should have enough to deal with the initial rush and can order more earlier based on demand.
I see. So is the understanding that FIRST does not, in fact, work with suppliers to let them know what will be in demand? That seems like an even more obvious thing to do than tell the teams…
I suspect Andymark had some idea what motors would be legal this year, since there are a pair of AM only motors specifically listed in the rules. And I think we should give them credit for being clever enough to know that things like the CIM-sim and that CIM-interface dual FP planetary will be wildly popular pretty much every FRC season.
So I have an alternative explanation. Andy Baker said they had about $1 million in inventory coming into the season. Has it occurred to anyone that they probably simply couldn’t afford to have any more stock on hand than that? All their inventory costs money to produce, so they have to stop stocking things when they run out of money. (Or nearly. Having a buffer is a pretty good idea.)
I have a feeling that even if AndyMark knew more details about the game, it simply couldn’t afford to keep any additional inventory in stock without taking out a loan, which would be a ridiculous way of doing business. So the only real answer would be for FIRST to tip teams ahead of kickoff as to what kinds of motors and gearboxes they should stock up on.
I think that’s a little pointless since that’s unlikely to give you much more direction than you already have. You already know a dual FP gearbox is a useful thing. Especially if it has a CIM-like output. There’s quite a selection of modular gearboxes available from AM and Banebots as well that let you have a pretty large selection of ratios from a relatively small amount of inventory. Really, I think older teams should be looking at building up a small inventory of parts to pull from before kickoff. There’s nothing on Andymark that ships quicker than a gearbox that’s on your shelf.
This is kind of what I was thinking after hearing about their $1 million inventory. And, who knows, maybe banebots is in the same situation, they simply don’t have the capital to put forward to be prepared for the build season. There’s only so far the suppliers can go to have enough in stock, so the best we can do is make our plans sooner and give ourselves time for shipping and/or fallbacks. And I still hold that a lot of teams still won’t take much action before build season starts even if given information ahead of time, and even for the ones that do, you kind of want to get an idea of what your design calls for before blowing several hundred dollars on gearboxes (not that it’s not a worthwhile investment, but teams have the same limitations on capital as businesses).
There are many other sources for gearboxes as well. We used several drill transmissions last year on our 'bot. For the 775, we spent less than $40 for an old high quality cordless drill from a used tool shop, they’re cheap when they don’t come with batteries. It was even a 2-speed and had anti-backdrive. I would honestly trust it more than an AM Planetary, not to diss AM, but drill transmission are orders of magnitude higher in terms of products sold and years in service (the latter may just be a single order of magnitude).
I can totally agree. I have been ordering stuff like crazy and getting a shipment to the house just about every two days. We only do some little stuff, but they are going crazy. I can not imagine how much those big name places are working right now. It’s has to be about one full truck from and to UPS each day, maybe two.
Frankly, this year, there is no ‘un-replaceable’ component from any supplier.
Can’t get a Cim-sim? Get two AM Planetaries and mount them side by side, joined with chain (3.67:1 vs 5:1). Can’t get one of those 5:1 banebots? Dewalts will do nicely(3 or 4:1 all the way up to 40+:1). Or one of thier other gearboxes, with a different ratio and make up the rest with a sprocket output (We’re doing this). Can’t get the FP? Try the dreaded RS-775, or the RS-550’s (We’re doing both).
We’ve gone through this for the last 3 years. We initially design with what we ‘want’, then make modifications to make it work. Heck, I was going to purchase all the components for the CIM-sim yesterday. If anyone noticed, the only one out-of-stock were the flush nuts and studs. They had all the other components, minus one nylon spacer you could buy from Mcmaster.
It may not be the ideal solution, but any team that’s been around since before AM remembers having to essentially make or modify your own transmissions, because there simply weren’t any off-the-shelf solutions that we have now.
I’ll save you the walk-uphill-both-ways-to-school lecture… but things are a lot better now than they were 5-7 years ago.
I’ve heard that AndyMark has scheduled three FedEx trucks to visit the shop daily, and with that at times they struggle to keep up. I’ve also heard that since making the move to the new shop, their receiving/shipping is much more streamlined and efficient.