I ordered 1892 YEL from Flaghouse.com last week and followed up on my order today. I received word from their customer service that 1892 YEL is out of stock until end of April:
Do teams know of other sources for the equivalent ball? Off-brand options, different skin types, etc are not equivalent for the sake of our use case, as these characteristics can dramatically change the ball’s behavior.
I also heard that this shortage may impact FIRST’s official field inventory of Power Cells. Will this impact FIRST’s plan for swapping out Power Cells at events? If so, FIRST should make an official announcement regarding the revised quality of Power Cells teams should expect to play with.
This is pure speculation, but given how their timeline lines up with the end of season, I wonder if they’re marking them as out-of-stock to other customers because any supply in the meantime is solely devoted to FIRST.
I placed an order from Flaghouse last week for yellow balls. After speaking to customer service they explained a “glitch in their system that lost my order”. Nearly 15 emails back and forth and it appears they’re “out of stock until mid April”.
Edit:
Just got off the phone with Flaghouse customer service. They’re completely out of yellow and overwhelmed with orders because of “this robotics competition”. They will replace yellow balls in the 24 pack if preferred.
Sorry this doesn’t answer the original question about another supplier, just wanted to update in case anyone else needed balls.
After a few emails back and forth, Flaghouse is shipping us a 24 pack of the orange balls.
Not ideal, but should be functionally equivalent for our purposes (we don’t vision-track Power Cells).
I hope FIRST takes a more active role in ensuring FRC teams can source game elements in the future. FIRST shouldn’t be leaving this to teams and Flaghouse to figure out.
The Bisbee team has 6 balls that are different colors, and are dino skin, and they are much “glossier” than the official balls. More like the boulders from 2016
But you should take this with a grain of salt…I’m going from my memory from last week, when I last looked at those balls. I think they say Dino Skin on them, but not positive.
I called flaghouse last week and found out the yellow balls were out of stock. I was told the other colors were in stock and were the same (except color). I asked the sales representative to honor the 24 ball kit price for other color balls and she was able to with approval from her manager. I ordered a variety of colors and they should arrive tomorrow. I will report back our findings once we receive them.
