We are a team with parts from the past couple of years that we most likely will reuse. Do we still have to include those costs on the BOM?
COTS parts right? Yes, you still have to put the on the BOM.
Ok so with COTS we do but what about custom parts? Do we just include the raw materials costs? Do KoP parts such as the AM chassis also go on the BOM?
If the rules hold the same as previous years, custom parts are not to be reused. You have to make them during the build season for them to be legal. And yes, report the material costs in your BOM/CAW
KoP parts from the current year are excluded from the final cost. But it’s a good idea to document them anyway and just zero the cost.
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You should read the Pre-Kickoff Game Manual Content. There have been some changes in pre-Kickoff work legality that may not cover something made from a fresh billet of aluminum…but it would likely make a sprocket with some extra holes legal where it wouldn’t have been before.
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Also for custom parts, I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure if developed prior to the competition season, you need to release a publicly available cad model before kickoff
On the pre kickoff manual, it says software must also be included that’s on the robot. I am a bit confused as to what this means because isn’t the robot code all free and would this pertain to other third party software like a recording feature with a camera or is it entirely something else?
That would be great news to reuse slightly modified COTS parts.
The general policy on software exists to prevent teams from developing a large library of private code they build upon year after year. Teams that want to reuse code from a previous year only have to release before kickoff to be able to use it in the coming season.
We solve this by just keeping our code in an open GitHub repo year round: https://github.com/frc2357
So what does a team write down for software if hypothetically they don’t reuse anything previously released?
If you don’t have any previous code you’re using, or third-party code, you don’t have anything to worry about.
On ours, just to be thorough we list the base WPI Lib, and the CTRE Phoenix Lib, and our repo for our robot code for that year.
Why did you list it prior to 2020?
We didn’t put it on the BOM last year but we did have a document to track where we use software from and links to sources. It was more for our own organization purposes.
The truth is that nobody knows how this new rule will be interpreted in actual practice, as it was simply slipped in during a rule update. It’s up to us to explore through our experience this season and via the QA.
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The open source and zero cost software (including software with educational licenses) treadily available to all teams are < $5.00 and do not belong on the BOM. I don’t see anything in the rule that changes that.
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