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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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I'm wondering how the Chinese "lego-compatible" ecosystem fits in here? It seems like an easy win FIRST and some up-and-coming brand.

My oldest is 8 and has been playing around with knock-off technic legos for about 2 years. They're about 30% the price of name-brand, and the pieces themselves seem basically just as good. The instructions and designs are definitely not as good as lego, but this seems like a place where FIRST could put in Western-quality work for cheap.

Some of the knock-off stuff is legitimately better than lego too. We have ~5 sets of fake-duplo marble runs that are legitimately much more fun to play with than anything lego makes in the duplo age range (both for kids and adults).

I think they definitely need to be a part of whatever FIRST goes with. Even if not!FLL wanted to keep the Lego relationship going, the possibility Lego might just stop selling to them (or worse, sell and then delay a shipment at the last moment) because they're direct competitors is a Sword of Damocles for the entire ecosystem. And the clone vendors are just way too attractive to ignore, since in many cases it's cheaper to buy from them than to get raw plastic feedstock.

The trouble's the practical side of that:

  • You need someone who can actually negotiate that purchase and sales infrastructure at scale, with guarantees that it will last. That's hard to do because any contract to someone who only exists as a corporate entity overseas isn't worth the paper it's written on, but it can be done well enough. I just don't think FIRST has anyone who can do that. It'd be a major project just to figure out how to handle the kit bundling and sales.
  • You need compliance. A sizable portion of these kits are going to schools that simply won't buy your products without the right paperwork, but even direct sales might make their insurers pucker without it. For the US, that means CPSIA testing, ATSM F963, and (for electronics) FCC Part 15 testing. All I know for EU/AU/whatever is that they're more additional costs. Individually, these aren't tremendously expensive compared to the pure development side, but there's a lot of them, they add up, and they're very vulnerable to supplier changes. Almost no Chinese manufacturer does this stuff, and any that pretend should be treated as suspect. (I have no idea how dropshippers or aiislove handles this, outside of probably 'not': enforcement is extremely rare unless there's a serious incident, so a lot of small businesses can get away with 100-scale or 1000-scale sales, but that won't let FIRST do it for 30k units).
  • You need a real electronics solution. There's a mountain of Chinese vendors here, but it's overwhelmingly targeting the hobbyist sector (or, less charitably, 'cheap crap' sector). The world of 'good programming environments, well-hardened enclosure, focused on 6-14 year-old market, discrete motor hardware' is a lot smaller. The set that does that and can pass compliance and make 30k kits a year for ten years is basically zero: either they're building controller boards that change with whatever silicon is trendy, they have an RoHS status of 'trust me bro', or they're intended to compete with Vex IQ rather Technic, or some combination of the above. You could build a relationship with someone that's making it something for you seriously... but I don't know that FIRST can.
  • You need a sales avenue that isn't crazy. The average FLL lead mentor is not going to buy from Alibaba. The average school team can't buy from Alibaba. Traditionally FIRST has relied on AndyMark and Rev Robotics (and to a lesser extent, CTRE) to do that, and none of them can handle this sort of process and production run.

Where do you buy this stuff?

Search amazon for "duplo marble run" and you get all sorts of cool knock-off duplo sets that are so much better than anything lego makes: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=duplo+marble+run

It depends a lot on what you're looking for. DeCADA is one of the higher quality vendors and has a real store, but mostly sells full kits and only a little cheaper. Mould King is closer to Lego Mindstorms is capabilities and has a more serious price delta, but they've had some occasional missteps with early kits. If you just want bricks and parts, either to build your own set or as replacements, GoBricks is the biggest bulk manufacturer with a good reputation, although I have no idea how well they'd scale to FIRST's demand.

And if you just want bulk and don't care what, AliBaba has absolute tons... but the quality can be flaky.

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