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Originally Posted by flamer075
Well I don't wish to specify our objectives with helium.
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It would be better for everyone if you just told us. I can almost guarantee you didn't stumble on some huge game-changing secret that no one else figured out. There's no need to keep secrets here, if you're obscuring something that's potentially illegal you're only hurting yourself.
Regardless, there are several ways that helium would be illegal to have on a robot. Is helium doing work (in the physics sense)? Then it could be argued that helium is a violation of R37:
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Non-electrical sources of energy used by the ROBOT, (i.e., stored at the start of a MATCH), shall come only from the following sources:
compressed air stored in the pneumatic system,
a change in the altitude of the ROBOT center of gravity, and
storage achieved by deformation of ROBOT parts.
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It looks like part A is a potential loophole, except that all compressed air must come from an FRC legal compressor, which just uses air from the surrounding atmosphere and not from a particular source.
In addition, almost any component involving helium would be a pneumatic component by definition. There are many pneumatic rules, but all require the use of unmodified OTS components and none of the rules allow you to use helium to fill tanks instead of normal compressed air.