I love alot of things FIRST has been doing in the last few years Bag and tag being a good example going in the right direction. But we are now so large, we are exausting the worlds supply of many items. We need to evolve, FIRST should announce all allowed motors and electronics and other nongame items one year in advance. This would greatly reduce the cost for many first teams and help rookie teams find items where now all they see is out of stock on everything they need.
Sure it’s fine to announce the list of allowed motors but does it really matter until the game is released? What is important is the motors you will want to use – with last years game the run on Fisher Price 0673’s and this years run on 1/2 hex bearings (this year somewhat less so) are game dependent. There’s no way to solve this problem without giving away the game a year early.
Talons and 888’s is a great example of an item that had to wait. If teams were allowed to stock up sooner then Across the road and IFI could had better kept up with demand.
Welcome to the real world where supply cannot be guaranteed. We are all under the same conditions when it comes to supply of certain items. Some teams just got luckier than others? is that fair. No, but who said the Real World is fair?
This is just another way that FIRST prepares the students in this awesome program for real world challenges. You must learn to adapt.
In the real world, market demand pricing rules. With the compressed time frame, an auction based model for the donated material is a reality lesson. Give us some “FIRST Bucks” and let us price what we need as we see fit. The government/leadership fixed price model has proven to be a failure every time out. Let’s teach the kids about the real world.
I didn’t realize that the engineering/manufacturing got together to auction items. Material delays and production overruns are part of everyday business. I’m not sure how this relates to price fixing in all honesty.
But let’s leave that for a minute…
Let’s look at motor controllers for a moment. We have three very good options this year (I don’t ever remember having 3 before in my year with FIRST). Are some out of stock? yep. Can you still order at least 1 of the alternates. Yep. Is your season over if you can’t get your hands on those 6 talons you need for your very limited space on your electronics board? nope. Adapt.
Let’s look at hex bearings. Man our drive train is hosed without those bearings. really? What about hex bushings? Those are available. Man, I really need those hex hubs for my shooter. What about banebots wheels that have a built in hex hub? What about a keyed shaft solution?
My final words on this topic: adapt.
Being the taciturn engineer that I am, I posited a position in four sentences instead of four paragraphs.
The point I was getting at was that the “prices” on FIRST Choice were not market prices. They were predicted values by some who were knowing, but not fully informed about the demand for the product in the marketplace. Combined this with a first to the post purchasing arrangement (compounded by electronic topological locality advantages), and you have a warped market that generally occurs only when governments try to interfere with free markets. If things were right, the prices of the current leftovers on FIRST Choice would be much lower. Instead, there is remaining inventory at fixed prices. Some items disappeared faster than the sales system could be corrected .Why anyone would want a flawed cable (from last year) priced for more than the shipping price escapes me, but maybe someone will take it (bigger fool theory).
By the time that kickoff occurs, the number of teams are known, and the amount of donated support is known. Let’s have a free market lesson. Every team bought in to the pot with the same amount. They each get the same amount to spend on the donated hardware and services. Open a true auction for the available goods & services, and let it run for a week. No dependencies on the quality or location of Internet services, or on the real time abilities of the order entry system. And this washes out this year;s problems with the ordering system. Here’s a hook to get eBay involved with FIRST.
This comes closer to the real world than the current setup. The customer offers the most for what they think is most valuable. The supplier sorts through the demand for their product, and either declines or accepts some business, by their standards of profitability. The demand side assesses the relative merits of what is available to and bids accordingly. Oh, look, there’s an auction.
Just an Old Fart’s Observation :)_
I don’t understand this statement. We have plenty of Victor 888s in inventory ready to ship.
Not getting Talons was a disappointment. But not a huge problem. The flip side is look at the prices of motor controllers this year - down. Is the entry of the Talon into that area the cause of the price drop? Maybe not, but maybe in part. Competition is good. Hope they’re available next year…
While I agree with most of this statement, the part with which I disagree is of great interest to me. I agree that “real world unfairness” and the ability to adapt are great lessons, and I embrace them; however, I don’t think luck has much to do with which teams end up with high demand parts. I think it has more to do with teams that have more money (can order parts that “might” be of use on day 1), experience (can get to finalized CAD models within the first couple weeks), and manpower (have people who can be focused on sourcing parts, or more prototyping teams to be able to “adapt”).
So, my hypothesis* is high demand parts are disproportionately a problem for teams without the funds to “jump on” parts you might not use, and small teams without the manpower to adapt (since that means more time on re-engineering your design). This is not good for FIRST.
I am NOT advocating for any solutions which in any way hinder the elite teams. We love the elite teams. They inspire us. If they want to build 3 robots and need 40 hex hubs–that’s really cool and I would not want to limit them.
I AM advocating the discussion of solutions to this problem, as opposed to chalking it up as “welcome to the real world”. FIRST is about teaching hard lessons, but the mission is to inspire. Being able to reach a broader range of students and scaffolding their success on the way to being a sustainable team should therefore be a goal. This problem is in opposition to that goal.
I’m guessing there are many teams like us, that would benefit from a leveling of the playing field that brings us up. I wonder how many of the defunct teams would still be active if they had found a bit more success due to less work being required from access to FRC inspired products? I’m guessing having NO question that teams can access a KOP chassis is directly related to this.
IMO, I don’t think the auction plan is trying to solve the problem (high demand parts), but instead shifting the “lesson” elsewhere.
I think having an “early release” of some legal parts could help, and if vendors aren’t selling until build season then maybe setting up a survey to try to judge demand better.
That said, anything that could give away the game would not only be bad because it would lose some of the fun, but it would also tilt the playing field towards the elite teams even more than high demand parts.
I actually found first choice and the PDV to make a BIG difference for us this year. We now have 2 gearboxes we need that in past years wouldn’t have been available as KOP.
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*My personal experience that has led me to this hypothesis:
My FIRST experience has been 4.5 years as the only full-time adult mentor on a team in a very high poverty school district. Both myself and students have learned many lessons in that time, but the reality is knowing the lesson and growing from it are two different things. We KNOW we need to do better with fundraising, finding more sponsors/mentors, and recruiting more students, but we just struggle with it. We KNOW we need a CAD team, and to get our designs done earlier–but we still struggle. that said, we’ve only missed the elimination round once. If we had 4 years of missing the elimination round, I’m not sure if we would even HAVE a team. A few less kids any of those years and I don’t know what would happen. EVERY YEAR there are parts that would have made things MUCH easier than “adapting”, and I’m sure some teams had double digit quantities of them.
sometimes hearing things like “just adapt” can sound like “let them eat cake”
this year, if we had been able to save some of those first choice/pdv credits (afraid there would be nothing left!) until our design was better hashed out, and they were still in stock, we would have had 3 more gearboxes. That would have resulted in our 30pt climb design going forward; it was steady, safe, and left plenty of room for a shooter. From lessons learned before, we know we don’t have time to adapt our design, so we adapt by focusing on the other things. Will the students be less inspired? Will it decrease our ability to recruit sponsors/mentors/students? Who knows?
I’m not averse to letting it be known when I think FIRST (or its affiliates) screw up. But I’m not convinced that this is the solution, or even that this is an appropriate definition of the problem.
Perhaps FIRST needs to have a discussion (either internally or within the broader community) about the degree to which supply restrictions are intended to be part of the challenge, and the degree to which FIRST should be responsible for remedying, or perhaps more realistically, equalizing the impact on teams.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago that FRC rules mandated that all non-kit parts come from a (short) additional hardware list, or from the Small Parts (now Amazon Supply) catalogue. While that was great in some respects—it was an established supplier with a largely deterministic supply chain—there were unforeseen difficulties like economically and rapidly importing those parts to Canada during an FRC build season. Was it FIRST’s responsibility to do something about that, or was it just part of the challenge that 188 should have anticipated? It’s hard to say.
What is certain is that if FIRST is going to establish any premises about the role of supply constraints, they should be clear about them, and clear about their purpose. The vendor definition in the rulebook is much better than it used to be, but I see it as fundamentally off the mark. It adequately specifies how to verify that an ordinary business is a legal vendor—but there wasn’t really much question about those in the first place. The problem is that it fails to cohesively establish how to deal with a vendor that suddenly fails to meet the requirements. Should the vendor be punished or shunned? (How?) Should the team be punished or at least made to realize their error? (That’s not very nice, and perhaps only inspiring in the crudest of ways.) Should FIRST bend over backward to accommodate them, even to the extent of bending a rule, or tracking down an alternative supplier? (Impractical if widespread.)
I think there’s real value in the surprise aspect of the competition, and FIRST needs to continue to be thoughtful about how it leverages that. There’s also value in the self-containedness of the season; announce everything early, and you create a great incentive to operate year-round, because of the certainty involved. We’ll probably see more design re-use (something that FIRST has managed poorly, due to consistent use of unclear constraints), and more team member burnout as a result. But we might also see many much better robots. I’m not sure if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, because I don’t think FIRST or the FIRST community have coherently established what they believe the metrics for this are.
Given that it doesn’t seem to be especially urgent that change happen right now, let’s have that discussion, before settling prematurely on a solution.
Is FIRST about the “real world”, or about a world with certain limiting assumptions? After all, in the real world, you can bribe a regulator to get what you want—hopefully this isn’t something that FIRST strives to emulate.
As for the issue of price controls, it’s not inherently a government issue—it’s an issue of market failure in general, which can occur as a result of regulatory constraints, monopolies, uninformed consumers, etc… From an economic perspective, the better lesson is to learn how to identify a market failure, no matter who’s to blame. The solution isn’t to assume that a price control is inherently a bad thing—especially in a market like FRC, which is clearly not entirely free.
In this example, I again wonder if FIRST’s intention is to emulate a market-driven interaction, or to do something else with fundamentally different objectives. It wouldn’t be surprising if FIRST instead felt some duty to maximize equity or utility, rather than maximize profit.
In the case of equity—because it’s a competition, and we typically recognize equity as one of the prime virtues of a well-orchestrated competition—FIRST might be attempting to set prices to ensure parity, instead of pricing in response to demand. This isn’t profit-maximizing, but I don’t think they particularly care.
Alternatively, in the case of utility, FIRST might be motivated to tailor the competition “to each according to his need”. This is viable if they have a good model of need—but may well fail if they don’t really understand the contingencies upon which need is based. That failure wouldn’t be an indictment of need-based service delivery, so much as an indictment of ill-informed policymaking. It’s an open question whether it’s even practical for FIRST to possess the knowledge needed to make policy on the basis of actual need—but that’s worth exploration in detail rather than dismissal out of hand.
Nobody ever accused me of being that kind of engineer.
I’m not sure if the solution to the “Out of Stock” parts, is releasing the list of legal motors for 20XX year early as an example.
However, when parts are out of stock that you need, that IS a problem.
As a team that has had in general, more resources to purchase parts either in bulk, ahead of time (without knowing the game and rules), or willing to pay expedited shipping to Hawaii, it does make a difference.
The concern we hear year in and year out are that teams are always waiting to get parts. A lot of times, its schools purchase order processing or team access to funds which make it difficult.
If FIRST, vendors, or the community can do things better in terms of availability of materials needed to build, why not explore and examine those options even better?
The main vendors such as AndyMark, IFI, Banebots, etc. have in general made things a lot easier for teams to build robots in recent years.
Why not continue to explore policies that aim towards that goal?
I think FIRST has really stepped it up in recent years, however, the issues that Sean brings up are still concerns/reality for many teams…whether its a real world lesson or not.