Cyber Week Sale at Playing With Fusion
Playing With Fusion is running a special “cyber week” discount on Venom Smart Motors, starting at quantity 1! We’ve also added a "4 plus a spare" package promotion, so you’ll be ready for whatever the season throws at you!
Upgrade your CIM to Venom!
We are introducing a “core return” program to upgrade your CIMs to full Venom capability! Send us your new CIMs and we’ll give them new bearings, integrated smart controller, and encoder all for less than the cost of a single Talon SRX - even before you drop an additional $40 on an encoder! Our assembly is done in the US, which makes this program possible. There are way too many details to cover here, so check out the “Upgrade My CIM!” product page for program details.
Release Update
Venom motor pre-orders have shipped and we’ve released a C/Java library package for the 2019 Rio Image that covers both Venom and Time-of-Flight sensors. LabVIEW will be released later this week, and our entire new product line is in stock and shipping now!
Yes!! $100 price point (in bulk)!
And the core return program is a really cool concept.
We have a bin of “rarely” used CIMs, that I’m not 100% confident are free of brush dust. Could we specify rebuilds using those cores and specifically accept any resulting dust issues in our end product, or is there a single line that needs to remain factory-clean?
Also, not super familiar with the motor modification rule but does it state that anyone is forbidden from modifying motors? Is only “the team” forbidden but the VENDOR allowed to modify their motors? That makes sense but who knows where common sense fits into the rules
I would describe the hypothetical motors on my robot as Venom motors received from Playing with Fusion, with an FMV of $99.80 based on the 5-pack pricing available from PwF.
The only motors and actuators permitted on 2019 ROBOTS include the following (in any quantity):
R35. The integral mechanical and electrical system of any motor must not be modified. Motors, servos, and electric solenoids used on the ROBOT shall not be modified in any way, except as follows:
If you described them as such, given last year’s rules, they’re not eligible. They’re not on the list of allowed motors. If you list them as a CIM, you’re looking at R35 questions.
Based on the wording in that blog post, sounds like you should be able to just consider it a Venom, seeing as how the post itself describes the motor as an upgraded CIM.
Venom is built with disassembled CIMs to begin with, the same model number listed as we accept for core return. The core model isn’t something different from the main offering, and it is a full-blown Venom and we back it as such. It isn’t a modified CIM, per FIRST rules - it’s a Venom motor. Hope this clarifies what is actually being offered here.
We can actually rebuild several other models of CIM (-1004 works, for example) , as well (VEX and AM sell the same motor, just different PN), we just don’t currently know what models of VEX CIMs match the latest AM version, or what differences all previous versions of CIMs have with the current version. I think there have been at least 4 revs over the years.
Missed this earlier. We are willing to do a build with slightly used motors as long as were notified upfront. In this case we’ll do exactly what you say - we’ll turn your cores around. If something isn’t reworkable for some reason we will let you know and figure out a way to deal with it. It shouldn’t take more than a few days to do this, operation.
We don’t want to do “well used” motors, as they can be very messy inside (carbon dust). Our first dev motor builds had been used for a full season (2 tournaments plus champs) and operated just fine, but they were a mess to deal with as brush dust sticks to everything
Long ago when I inspected, I had one team put something like $100 each for two CIMs because (in the pre-smartphone era) they couldn’t find what they actually paid when they were making their BOM. I know they didn’t actually pay $100 per motor, but they showed they cared and were clearly within the BOM limits. Meh, that’s fine, next.
Full price is the tricky bit. With the upgrade with core price at $74.95 ($69.95 if you order 6, I’m not even talk about that yet). I would argue it’s reasonable to replace a KOP checklist CIM with a CIM that meets the playingwithfusion.com standards for being upgraded, based on the identical functional replacement rules. I’d then argue that the $75 you paid to playingwithfusion is for parts and labor which is a valid price that can be put on the BOM.
I didn’t realize we’d spark BOM and modified parts discussions, so this has been entertaining!
Using the KOP checklist CIM as a freebie and using $69.95 as the upgrade cost seems like a reasonable approach to me. At the highest, I’d put $99.80 in the BOM, reflecting the volume pricing.
