Kit and Hardware Guide¶
Before beginning your season, your team is presented with a crucial decision - one that will undoubtedly heavily influence the team’s direction of hardware design in at least the first year. The FIRST storefront currently offers two kits for new teams: the TETRIX kit from Pitsco, and the REV Starter kit from REV Robotics. However, teams should carefully consider other options, such as Actobotics from Servocity and goBILDA, before selecting a kit. Every build system has advantages and disadvantages, which we have highlighted in our detailed build system guides below. While the guide may be slightly biased, we purposefully chose to do so, stemming from our own experience with the different kits, so the slant is there with reason. As with pretty much anything in FTC, there is no one right answer - but of course there are better answers than others. We hope this guide gives some solid advice on which kit might be the best for you.
Why use a kit?¶
After all, plenty of successful robots have not followed this framework. However, we still recommend new teams purchase a starter kit for one big reason. Established teams are all but guaranteed to have spare parts lying around to use to build their next bot. However, rookie teams, as is obvious, don’t have the plethora of parts from previous seasons to use. Thus, new teams should purchase these parts themselves in order to have something to build from once the season starts, and starter kits offer these parts for less money than they would be if bought individually. As will be discussed, options that don’t involve kits exist and are certainly very useful, but sticking to parts designed for FTC is recommended for new teams as a starting point.