My school might have to stop doing VEX because the game elements are costing too much each year, and we can’t get enough funding. Why do the elements cost $500, even though they cost about $250-$275 to make? Even $425 would be possible to keep going with VEX.
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It’s not just game elements, pretty much everything with vex seems a bit on the more expensive side because they get to set their prices and dictate which parts are legal or not.
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That’s true. Everyone wishes that the prices weren’t so high though.
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This was their guidelines for pricing two years ago, until the vexrobotics website was updated
Source
Now…
Motors cost $45 per
Vision sensor costs $80
Brain costs $350
Controller costs $125
Battery costs $70
Assuming you buy 2 batteries, 8 motors, a vision sensor, a brain, and a controller to build a vex robot, an additional $195 has been added to your budget from 2018.
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14 dollars left?! That is kinda insane! These prices are killing everyone.
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Probably has to do with the supply chain issues around the world.
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Supply chain is one thing affecting it.
Especially as demand for special supplies goes up, the cost of manufacturing goes up, and the need to increase price goes up as well to maintain a profit as well. No prices remain static in any market, that’s just economics.
One of the things @Grant_Cox has said before on Town Halls and other things regarding the game design process is, their challenge every year is to make a game that costs no more than $500. This actually limits you a decent bit material wise, and construction wise.
Other ways of easing that cost are to work with your club sponsor or adult team representative to host competitions as an Event Partner, where you receive a $250 discount on game elements.
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The game element cap is also a problem. Roboteers are asking for more challenging games to play. VRC spans Middle through University, VIQ is Elementary through Middle. What may be a huge challenge to a middle school team may be boring to a HS team (and the same for VIQ).
Which means more elements, more complicated elements.
The FIRST FTC game Freight Frenzy has the same issues, and it is $450.
A 16 team event can be done on a single field in a cafeteria. It’s not hard to setup or run. Or pair up with a school to help, one field to them, one field to you. Hold the event for 24 teams. (There is also a break on Award Costs) RECF wants events, teams want events, here is a way to do events!
Can you talk more about how much you started with and how it was spent? If you are really a brand new team then I can see with floor tiles (250), perimeter (800), game elements (500), competition robot kit (1300), registration (150)and two events (300) (With Shipping about $3,000 total)
As a second year team, the floor tiles, perimeter and most of the robot is still good. So you should be down to adding some parts (400), new field elements(500), registration(200) and two events(300) (Total about $1,400).
For lots of seasons you could buy 1/2 of the field. For this year you could have shared the expense with another team and split the game and field elements. You only need 1/2 to practice with.
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I’m normally pretty (overly?) critical of VEX, but a lot of this is wrong.
This seems high. $5k to start a team seems closer to being reasonable. Which, to be fair, is still a lot of money.
In order to use an Arduino to power motors at the same strength as the V5 motors you’re going to need some pretty beefy motor control boards, and you’re also going to need to figure out how to power all of that, and also you need to figure out radio communication. So yes, you could, but the barrier to entry is much higer. Also, the motors you get aren’t going to be compatible with a nice building system like VEX, so I hope you have the machining capability to actually manufacture a robot.
So yes, you could build it yourself with Arduino, and honestly probably learn a lot more. But that is not a good low barrier to entry robotics competition platform out of the box.
Only allowing their parts ensures this doesn’t become FTC where there’s a huge gap between teams who have access to advanced machining capabilities and those who don’t. If you don’t limit the parts teams can use, suddenly I can build my robot out of like… carbon fiber or something. And then VEX as it exists now looks a whole lot more relatively affordable.
Ah, yes, all that’s missing are a bunch of ports able to drive motors on the order of 2.5A, an operating system that enforces the competition rules, the IO required to interact with sensors, and generally all the things that are required for a robotics platform.
Of course the Android phone is cheaper, firstly because it lacks the capability to be the basis of a robotics platform, and secondly it’s made of mass market components driven cheaper by economies of scale. Like 3/4 of the planet has a phone, much fewer have a competition robot, of course we know how to make phones way cheaper than robots.
The reason I continue to volunteer in this program, despite my numerous and frequent complaints, is that it remains the most affordable high school robotics competition with any real market share. If something just as good comes along that’s cheaper, I will be the first one to jump ship.
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I second that.
~ someone that can be at times critical of VEX and RECF
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How do you know what they’re “actually worth”? The only way I can think of is to put them on the market for a set price and see if/how many people buy them, and fortunately for us, VEX has done that. We observe that the same people who incessantly complain about overpriced, under-ESD-protected, breakable VEX continue to buy those same products.
I think you are underestimating the value of competitive robotics. People calculate the cost of running/joining a team and are willing to pay it. Maybe if people thought of the overpriced-ness as a registration fee instead of a materials charge, there would be less complaint. After all, VEX/RECF are free to set whatever price they want on joining their competition, and everyone else is free to join or not join. I think the number of VEX competitors is a testament to the value of competitive robotics.
If people are willing to pay “3-5 times what it's actually worth” in exchange for parts that work together, apparently those parts are worth 3-5 time what [they're] actually worth. How do you know what they’re “actually” worth? Everyone sets a different value on just about everything. If it’s not worth the price to you, why are you paying it? Just quit.
Yes, we all complain about the prices, but to many of us, in the end, it’s worth it.
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As someone who runs both a VRC and FRC team, let me just tell you that VRC is still waaaay more affordable than either FTC or FRC even despite the rise in costs.
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My FTC team in HS was still way more expensive in 2010-2012 than it is one VEX team for me right now.
I graduated HS over 10 years ago
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I did FRC back in 2008-2010 and our budget was like $35k-40k per year. That did include travel to competitions but still. VEX was always a bit pricey, even back in the days of radio crystals and PIC brains, but with 3-4 robots and ~25 students I don’t think we spent more than $8k-10k a year including reimbursements for parents who helped drive to events. Additonally, for FRC we only did 2 competitions, VRC we always did 6-8 depending on what was scheduled.
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Our budget this year is ~$10k as essentially a first-year team. This includes storage, tools, and parts for 2 robots. I didn’t include a field, since I already own one. Budget going into following years looks to be $3-4k? Not sure yet.
Keep in mind that both budgets do not include registration or travel fees.
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Right, because FRC and FTC don’t exist and don’t have non-Vex suppliers.
Please do, tell us how things work.
Finally, a statement we agree on.
VRC, FTC, and FRC are all expensive. Having had some experience with all 3, I would say that VRC is the most affordable, which echoes what many others say. That said, “bake sales” aren’t the only way to fundraise; many posts here talk about how best to pitch local companies to sponsor teams and organizations.
I don’t have experience with “combat robotics”, but perhaps that would scratch your robotics itch and allow you to use Arduino’s etc. and (possibly) come in at a lower price point.
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I think it is time for us to list “What have the RECF/VEX ever done for us?”
Monty Python’s Life of Brian tirade about the Romans is pretty close:
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You will be shocked to learn that in FTC, the major competitor to VRC, their main controller costs $300, and the driver hub costs an additional $200, bringing the total to $500 to VEX’s $350.
A V5 motor costs $45, motors in FTC cost $40 plus a $35 motor controller, and they don’t even have a built in encoder. Again VEX is cheaper.
(I could be wrong about FTC pricing, I have no idea how FTC works, this is just what I found on a website that appears to sell official FTC stuff)
These are not mass market products. In mass market products, development costs such as firmware and hardware development can be spread across a larger number of consumers. If you have a smaller market, things get more expensive.
(Side note, it feels so weird to be defending VEX. Ummm… SG3 was bad and they should feel bad, bring back Bo3, V5 is a step backwards as a general purpose hobbyist robotics platform by making everything a closed source black box. OK, I feel better now)
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We don’t know exactly what Vex’s Finances and Logistics are, so we have no idea how much they may or may not be making from their products. As much as I don’t like seeing the prices go up, I suspect it (and the decision to discontinue resellers) is probably the result of the economic situation right now. We’re still in a global chip shortage, inflation continues to rise, and logistics are even more of a nightmare now.
The cost for a company to make a product is not just the sum of the parts that go into it, there’s hundreds if not thousands of other variables that can effect the cost of production.
There’s also the cost of the labor that the workers put into making the products,
the labor that went into engineering the product,
the labor to engineer the machines to make the products,
the labor to maintain those production machines and any machines necessary to maintain them,
the cost of parts for all that maintenance,
the cost of the Quality Assurance staff/machines that make sure the products work as intended,
the cost of shipping all the parts/products to the warehouses,
the taxes and import duties on the products as they come into whatever country they’re going to,
the cost of utilities and upkeep of whatever warehouse the products are stored in,
the cost of labor for the workers in the warehouses,
the cost of shipping the product to the end user,
the cost of ongoing free (to the end user) tech support for those products,
the cost of ongoing free (to the end user) software updates for the products,
the cost of replacing and fixing whatever faulty products get past QA and to the end user.
There are MANY more things I could list just off the top of my head, but I think you can see what I’m getting at by now. The price of the product is not just the bill of materials, but the cost to run the whole portion of the company that comes up with the idea of and creates those products, gets them to your front door, and makes sure you’re happy with it. These costs are always changing (likely going up), and on top of that the company NEEDS to make good enough profit margins on its products expand their operations and create new products in order to stay in business.
We have no clue as to what the real word numbers behind these products are other than the one that Vex currently deems appropriate to sell them at. While we may wish that the prices were lower, it’s very likely that it isn’t out of pure greed that the prices are what they are, rather they are priced appropriately in order to keep the company still in business for years to come. And I think we all would much rather see them stay in business as if there is no Vex, there is no Vex Robotics Competition. And flawed as it may be there is a reason it’s one of, if not the, biggest robotics competition in the world. VRC has one of the most easy to get into robotics control systems, while still being priced low enough that a huge amount of schools are able to afford teams to compete in it. And while DIYing a robot out of other electronics may be cheaper, you need to spend more time and know a lot more than you do to get into Vex. With V5 if you want to get a motor to spin you need maybe 5 seconds to plug in a single cable, and a minute or two to get the code completed, compiled, and downloaded. If I wanted to I could build, wire, and program a functional drivebase in under 2 hours if I was working slowly.
It is the reason why many of the students that have competed in it are even interested in STEM in the first place, with many going on to fill much needed jobs in STEM fields. And I can personally say VRC is the reason why I have the job that I do today, and I would hate to see it go away.
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I know exactly what’s inside
To replicate I guess you could start with the Microzed eval board which was used in V5 prototypes, cost $214 - $318 based on which configuration you choose, then add 22 smart ports, 3wire logic etc. and I would be surprised if it’s even possible to build a DIY V5 for less than $400.
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