With Tony Norman currently still CEO of IFI how much of a pressure is there on teams to not use IFI or Vex products?
It can be hard to make a swap in critical components during the build and competition given component availability, or power and size requirements. Off-season doesn’t have those constraints. Offseason is the time on our team, and I assume others, to explore new technology and strategies.
Every part Vex and IFI sells has an alternative. Is there a way the community can help shift teams, especially those with the financial means to swap away from supporting Tony Norman?
Short of putting up QR codes linking to info about IFI at events, a move that might warn you the ire of event planners (for no good reason imo), it is hard to do more than spread information by word of mouth.
Many teams will choose to use Vex products regardless because it gives them a competitive advantage.
Frankly, we need FIRST to step up or a coordinated push to agree that putting up such flyers at events is the right thing to do.
Unfortunately for many teams, they have already bought into the Vex ecosystem, and have built up a large stock of vex parts over the years. It’s not as simple as just throwing all of it away. Unless there is a “buy back” program to swap vex products for alternatives, many teams can’t justify the expense of buying all new everything when they already have perfectly functional parts.
I don’t think any pressure should be put on teams who use the products, since they may not have a choice. However, putting up informative flyers (with permission of course) could at least spread awareness about the Vex/IFI situation and let teams make the decisions for themselves.
Many teams are not in a financial position to simply swap their existing stock and even knowledge base of parts overnight. It doesn’t matter how ideal you think an offseason is, they shouldn’t be penalized or pressured for that.
Products that are already paid for also do not further impact IFI’s bottom line.
There are tons of reasons teams may stay with a Vex ecosystem, not just this. It’s dangerous to set the precedent that this is the only reason they might stay with it. What we need to promote is resources to make the switch as simple as possible.
If REV and other vendors keep up the blitz on Build Guides, making ecosystem Friendly parts or even Vex system compatible parts more teams could switch for many things. The issue for us currently is when we wanted 90° gearboxes this year for example, andymark’s was out of stock all season, the ones from REV would require us to also buy all new planetary gearboxes when we already had the vex ones from years prior so we had to go with the Vex 90°s.
Sometimes you don’t have a choice. That being said we are conscious of the issues with Tony everytime we are forced to make a decision to buy from them and I don’t like it one bit.
While they may be getting closer, Rev is not a one to one replacement for all Vex products. I also think it’s potentially problematic to be all in on a single vendor anyway, even if the company doesn’t have the same type of issues. I hope that ecosystem continues to have competitive vendors as well to spur further innovation.
Zero from my circle. I don’t know who horse-traded to get a robot together, I don’t know who is using up old stock, I don’t know who bought a surplus sale off eBay, I don’t know who’s got a purchasing department that’s hell on getting vendors approved.
I have no plans to give them more money personally, but I’m not going to judge other teams off that.
The more competition between vendors the better absolutely! I hope some day we’ll have like 3-4 different ecosystems of structure and maybe 2-3 choices for control hardware ecosystems (at least one more beyond REVs current offering).
I singled out REV because of their new push this year to have the EveryBot and similar guides. Those guides when VEX would do the Minimum Competitive Concept designs is what got us into the VEX ecosystem. We’d see the MCC bots and think wow… We could build that too and look at the B.O.M. for ideas.
Idk who else has enough parts though beyond REV and VEX to really give them a run for their money on ecosystem parts. Probably will be WCP (next vendor in line of Drive System components and structure) or a complete newcomer next.
Agreed. As a team that was 90% female and continues to have more than 50% female students, the values of the team do not align with Vex. This year we have had our best season yet using only Rev, Andymark, and WCPWest Coast Products.
Okay… I may have thought of an actually useful idea. What about a browser extension that can redirect you to a compatible In Stock part from another vendor? So if someone is on a site looking at a VEX part it would show you alternatives you could get instead even if it’s from Grainger or McMaster Carr because no FRC vendor has it in stock.
Many people don’t know what parts would make suitable replacements or what’s truly compatible between the different systems. A “Hybrid Building Guide” that fuses REV and VEX (old stock) together would also be fantastic. When REV came into FTC there was a flood of Tetrix and GoBilda to REV ecosystem adapters needed. It happened a little over time but teams would just figure out home brew answers. Similar is happening now for the new REV parts we got this year. We just need a larger effort to show that you can start to switch while using up your old parts first and not being wasteful and tossing what you already have!
For the 90 degree versa stuff armabot has some really cool versa addons that could be a replacement if you are ever looking for one. I think thriftybot is a big up and comer in systems. They are continuing to release new parts yearly that are very good.
As a team with limited resources and a mass stock pile (not newly purchased, but still used) of everything Vex, adaptors are the only way we’d attempt to switch. While our new motors have been Neos (availability + not Vex), staying away from existing components is rather difficult, both in terms of use and gradual wear replacement. Some things can be replaced, sure, but for many it’s just to difficult.
Do you have 3d printers? That has been helping us transition because we can make custom adapters for just about anything, it’s not hard as metal but it’s helping us use up what we have. We’re in the same boat as you. Tons of existing VEX old stock to use up so we don’t have to buy any more (unless we don’t have a choice) until Tony and the inherent issues of that “Culture” are gone.