We get a lot of great things on FIRST Choice, and today’s start of window shopping opportunity gives us a great chance to figure out the best deals (actual value vs # of points) or highest demand items which will surely sell out fast.
However, looking through the list I always find some of the items downright laughable (ie, who would ever blow their credits on that??)
So I ask the community, how would you totally waste your 600 FIRST Choice credits?
My thought is 6 empty tool bags @ 100 credits each.
Maybe a slightly worse deal than purchasing 120 plastic thrust washers
Seems like the 7pc ratcheting wrench set is over priced. I could see it being useful for a first year team, but I would personally just go out and buy a set.
Shaft couplers, depending on your situation. If you have a lathe/mill, you can churn several out in an hour or two. Ideally I’d just buy a longer shaft.
EDIT: AC-DC 12v 1a wall adpaters. They’re really cheap on ebay ($2 each), and the cost offsets the “unreliability”. I’ve never had an issue with one.
Depends on the style. The clamping ones on Choice are like $40 each on mcmaster.
The ones that are literally a tube with setscrews are $10, but I’m our team’s machinist- and I’m cheap. I could make the setscrew ones in 10-15 minutes, depending on the number. Less if I had a rookie to tap them.
Now collars, those I would buy.
Shaft couplings, not shaft collars. Especially if they’re for different diameter shafts, couplings can run upwards of $40.
Collars are super cheap. I would totally buy those.
Generally shaft couplers are not used to make the shaft longer, but to facilitate assembly and disassembly.
…but quite cool if you had that capability.
Things seem reasonably ‘priced’ this year, more so than before. I find the pneumatic compo0nents to be good bargains: priced out fittings, tubing or valves lately? And an old-style PDB for an off-season or practice bot is a nice bargain.
I agree that the prices went to a much more acceptable level for most items. Pneumatics last year were just crazy under valued, as the fitting bag was about 10x cheaper last year. I’m all in on the old control system parts, might not help for the 2015 build season but there are 10 other months in the year for teams to find uses for them.
I’m confused a little by the linear v-groove track since the lengths seem small and the bearings aren’t also available. I think it would be hard for teams to put it to good use but maybe I’m missing something.
I’d call the worst deal the 200 credits for a Classmate. If I had absolutely no other laptop that was usable for the drivers’ station and no way to get one, I might think about it. Maybe. The only way it could be worse? If teams were allowed to get three.
The tool bag deal I can see being a bit steep, but the tool bags can come in handy if you have tools for them.
The appear to be cutoffs, which Bishop Wisecarver would otherwise sell for scrap. Better to donate them (which can be written off at full value) I suppose.
But I agree: Too short for much value. I’d make a nice CNC router, but 16" of steel track doesn’t help.
The classmates are useful if a student wants to program but has no laptop available. The laptops are small but they’re perfectly good for programming or researching tools and parts on the internet. And it would be a last-minute backup for a driver station if your primary station laptop malfunctions (this happened to us last year at our regional when our laptop decided to stop communicating over Ethernet)
The individual Igus components seem like the obvious worst deal when there’s an entire bag of them.
The video card is easily the trickiest part since it’s only as good as the knowledge a team already has. Many school computers have the proper PCI-E slot, but don’t have a power supply that can support it. So it could definitely be a miss for a team that doesn’t check compatibility ahead of time. On the other hand, it could easily be a MASSIVE win for teams who need another CAD machine and have an “almost there” computer donated to them. It also means the team should have some knowledge of CAD to make any use of it, considering that the team won’t get it for another few weeks.
There are definitely some steals on there if a team has machining capability and can adapt to a part. 8 ABEC-rated metric bearings for 5 credits ?! :ahh: Or maybe they’re a miss if there’s a problem with reliability on the part, thus they’re at fire-sale rates.
For 95% of the CAD work most FIRST teams do, that video card is very overkill. An affordable ($200 range) workstation graphics card is all you really need for most modeling tasks. At this point, most reasonable computers are bottlenecked by CPU, not GPU, the opposite of most video games.
That said, if we have left over FC credits, I wouldn’t be upset if our team grabbed one for the CAD stations.
Agreed that it’s overkill. I’d argue for 90% of teams, a processor with integrated Intel HD graphics or a $100 graphics card is more than adequate. Most teams do not work at a level that would see any benefit whatsoever from this video card over one if the aforementioned solutions.
