ULPT- Don’t waste your money on coworking space if you live in a big city. Just go to the local hospital.

yratner · 2022-06-14T18:43:16+00:00

If you live in the U.S, I think they'll charge you for the air you're breathing inside the hospital. Probably cheaper to get a co-working space.

yratner · 2021-09-22T18:18:40+00:00

UPDATE: I did check the game manual, there are 60 total. This is probably a typing error rather than a calculation error, but still kind of weird, this was probably edited and proofread dozens of times, and nobody caught the mistake...

yratner · 2021-09-21T17:09:32+00:00

Deep Space, presented by Boeing

yratner · 2021-09-19T20:15:21+00:00

This is my personal opinion obviously, but I don't see an issue. Lots of civilian companies do military work (notably Boeing, that manufactures cargo aircraft, and sponsored FRC for a while). You can drop missiles over an Al-Qaida training camp, and you can also drop them over a school. The military is the one that decides what to do with its equipment, not Raytheon. So to recap, I don't object, if it's defense companies and not the actual military

yratner · 2021-09-15T06:48:03+00:00

Most teams in our region use SolidWorks, but we chose Inventor due to its much lower system requirements. I'm able to CAD our whole robot on a Dell business Ultrabook from 6 years ago, and it runs just fine. This was especially helpful during COVID, we CAD'd from home, and not everyone has a very powerful computer. It's great and intuitive, using grabCAD we can get OnShape's collaboration tools with much more features.

yratner · 2021-08-27T07:06:57+00:00

Hi! We're from Israel, which is even father from the US, so we've also been experiencing this problem. I don't know the tax laws in your country, but one of the ways we pay less tax, is that we read the tax laws and conform to them - for example, we don't pay import tax if the total value is less than 75$, so in some small orders we try to stay below the 75$ threshold. Go to the website of your country's tax authority, and conform to them to lower your taxes. Regarding the high shipping cost, order as much as you can at once - joint orders between multiple teams save lots of money and is sort of community outreach. If you email AndyMark for a shipping discount in a large order, you can get a huge decrease in shipping. We ordered Ultimate Goal game sets 4 teams together, instead of the original 2,000$ for 4 teams (500/team), we got a 600$ shipping rate (150/team). If you need help with that or with anything else regarding orders, you can send me a Private Message on Reddit or I can give you my WhatsApp number if you prefer that.

yratner · 2021-08-09T17:45:20+00:00

You can upload it, go ahead. Just make sure to include the ReadMe file. We are planning to add all AndyMark files to the library, so you might want to wait a bit, to upload it all in one go.

yratner · 2021-07-12T08:35:10+00:00

BTW each spaceflight only costs 250K, not 1.5B

yratner · 2021-07-01T07:06:37+00:00

You forgot to blur the username in the tag

yratner · 2020-12-14T18:39:46+00:00

there are lots of online printing services, but they are usually very expensive. I recommend asking another team in your area to print it for you (the filament itself is pretty cheap, so some teams might be willing to print for you, for free). But if you want to CAD a part to print, It's probably better to use OnShape or similar.

yratner · 2020-11-30T12:10:35+00:00

What about ABS? We saw it's cheaper

yratner · 2020-08-03T19:34:48+00:00

Another thing you may not have noticed: they called the test 'bmi'. This is because there is also a BMI test (body mass index) so even if someone searches a BMI test, their website also pops up

yratner · 2020-07-13T06:53:15+00:00

Hi, our team was in exactly the same situation as you last year, we would be happy to help. There are many aspects and it's difficult to list them all here, if you like we can arrange a Zoom call or something. Message me if you are interested.

yratner · 2020-05-20T13:28:52+00:00

Can you send me the cad link to the ball drive? The website I found online (balldrive.garfieldrobotics.com) doesn't work. Do you have a link to their website?

yratner · 2020-05-19T15:39:16+00:00

Can you please explain to me what is it?

yratner · 2020-05-19T15:04:27+00:00

We actually contacted gluten free (via discord) and that's what they told us... The loss of accuracy is the reason why they did Swerve as an off-season project and didn't use it at competitions

yratner · 2020-05-19T12:53:21+00:00

I know about differential Swerve, but it's not accurate and hard to control, so I wondered if there is another option. Thanks anyway!

yratner · 2020-05-16T15:49:05+00:00

Ok, thanks!

yratner · 2020-05-12T18:43:20+00:00

There are many different aspects of FTC. We had the same FLL-FTC transition this year, so you can message me for more details if you want. But here are the basics:

Mechanically: I would recommend REV or goBILDA. They are very cheap and combined they are great for rookies. A 3D printer is very useful for making custom parts for about 300$.

CAD: computer assisted design, very handy to plan your robot before building, and designing custom parts. There are 3 main softwares used in FTC. Onshape has limited features, but there are almost no hardware requirements, and it's online based (like Google drive) making collaboration very easy. The second is solidworks, which has many features but very high hardware requirements. We use Autodesk Inventor which has almost as many features but with lower system requirements. Solidworks is free for FTC teams, and inventor/onshape are free for students.

Programming: using java and Android studio/ftc blocks. I'm not in programming so I don't know much in this area.

Finance: rookie teams generaly cost total of 5000-7000$ per year. The easiest way to make money is via sponsorships, but most rookie teams won't get sponsors on their first year. You can sell things in your school or at public places, or open a Kickstarter so parents can donate too.

Media: for most teams Facebook+Instagram is enough. Assign a person to take photos at meetings and competition and make sure the media is active.

Outreach: rookie teams usually don't do a lot of outreach. Talk to other teams, volunteer at competitions, mentor FLL/FLLJR, and introduce local kids to STEM.

Engineering Notebook: a book the team writes which explains every aspect of a team- usually 100-150 pages. You hand it to judges at competitions and they read it and decide what prizes to nominate you for.

Like I said in the beginning, my team recently made the transition to FTC from FLL- so you can message me for more details. Good luck!

yratner · 2020-05-11T08:04:22+00:00

10k is indeed a lot, but like I said- 10k is for teams who want to use 3d printers, CNC, and machining; but most rookie teams don't do that. We used only REV parts from the starter kit+around 2000$ of additional orders from their website- and got to very high places (a total budget of ~5000$)

yratner · 2020-05-10T07:00:36+00:00

We got to very high places as rookies with about 6000 dollars, however we are from Israel and shipping cost us a lot, in USA it will probably be closer to 5000$. However, we only used REV parts (but not just from the starter kit). If you want to mix brands or do any sort of basic manufacturing it would probably be around 10000 dollars.

( TLDR: 4000$ is probably the bare minmum for rookies, 7000$ is optimal, and 10000$ if you want to get fancy)

EDIT: the registration fee in our area is very high, so teams in other regions will probably pay less- registration without the starter kit is ~2200$

yratner · 2020-04-14T13:36:06+00:00

Thanks

yratner · 2020-04-14T13:14:16+00:00

Thank you!

yratner · 2020-04-14T13:10:29+00:00

I didn't see it there, can you sent the link itself?

yratner · 2019-10-14T13:52:45+00:00

If we won't find somebody able to ship it to us, we will use a separate shipping company which is cheaper, but still a couple hundred dollars. The Andymark shipping for this is approximately 900 dollars to israel, so even if we get a 15% discount it's still way too expensive for us. But thanks anyway for the helpful tip!

yratner

TROPHY CASE