SR2015 Funding Update

[Rob Spanton]

Hey Everyone,

An update on sponsorship wranglings:

1. I submitted an application to the Motorola Solutions Foundation
last week for the same amount as in previous years (they are
generally providing as much as they can/want to).
2. After some delay, due to things being slow on the ECS side of
things, I invoiced ECS for £16850. (This is the amount that
they decided they wish to give us.)

With the following things:

- Our current cash-in-hand
- The ECS money (which we will receive shortly)
- ARM supplying ODROID-U3s (in cases with power leads)

We have enough money to achieve kit for 75 teams.

This week I have approached ARM to enquire about whether they would like
to increase their support, to allow us to get to 81 teams, as well as
have a few more dev kits. I hope to hear back over the next week or so.

Budget:

1. There are currently 8 budget amendments queued in gerrit.
2. You'll find the budgets for the sr2015 kit and comp in the
sr2015-kit and sr2015-comp branches of this git repo:
git://gitorious.org/sr-budget/budget.git

The sr2015-comp branch is not complete at the moment, but was
complete enough to construct an application to Motorola with.
Over the next few months I will be pursuing additional
sponsorship to support the SR2015 competition.

The sr2015-kit branch is for merging as soon as the ECS monies
arrive.

Cheers,

Rob

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Rob wrote:
> 2. You'll find the budgets for the sr2015 kit and comp in the
> sr2015-kit and sr2015-comp branches of this git repo:
> git://gitorious.org/sr-budget/budget.git
>
> The sr2015-comp branch is not complete at the moment, but was
> complete enough to construct an application to Motorola with.
> Over the next few months I will be pursuing additional
> sponsorship to support the SR2015 competition.

Cool, thanks for creating this.

Given that some of the guesswork which went into last year's budget
was unfortunately not picked up on by many people, I feel compelled to
ask if there are any areas here which represented guesses? Hopefully
we can get some additional eyes on the problem and potentially some
research into likely costs to increase our confidence in the numbers.

Having just submitted a patch [1] for server hosting for SR2014, I'm
noticing that that doesn't appear to be covered here. As I'm sure that
other people will think of even more things as the year progresses, do
you have a preferred medium for patches against it?

Could we, for instance, get this cloned onto badger as its own branch
able to accept submissions via gerrit?

Thanks,
Peter

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/gerrit/#/c/1664, relating to
https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/ticket/2486

[Peter Law]

> Rob wrote:
>> 2. You'll find the budgets for the sr2015 kit and comp in the
>> sr2015-kit and sr2015-comp branches of this git repo:
>> git://gitorious.org/sr-budget/budget.git

I wrote:
> Given that some of the guesswork which went into last year's budget
> was unfortunately not picked up on by many people, I feel compelled to
> ask if there are any areas here which represented guesses? Hopefully
> we can get some additional eyes on the problem and potentially some
> research into likely costs to increase our confidence in the numbers.

I've just had a quick look through all the files in the sr2015
directory (which I realise I probably should have done first, oh
well), and they all seem pretty reasonable. Thanks for including the
proposed volunteer competition expenses lines in that.

> Having just submitted a patch for server hosting for SR2014, I'm

> noticing that that doesn't appear to be covered here. As I'm sure that
> other people will think of even more things as the year progresses, do
> you have a preferred medium for patches against it?
>
> Could we, for instance, get this cloned onto badger as its own branch
> able to accept submissions via gerrit?

In the mean time, I've forked this onto my github [2], which now
includes this plus a fix for the competition/sound line being
non-consumable.

Thanks,
Peter

[2] https://github.com/PeterJCLaw/srobo-budget/tree/sr2015-comp