[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Jim Meyer

We used 4 gas struts that were used with a reverse block and tackle system to pull ~36" of rope. It wasn't as easy as it looked. It took us 3 design iterations to get the pull force and the amount of rope pulled right to get a legal hang. It was also huge, being roughly 4" x 6", starting at around 21" and expanding to 36" in length within the frame.

We were just laughing about this the other night as the energy we used to hang actually came from a student. It had a giant crank we used to just pull on the hang rope until the struts were compressed, then just re-latched it.

It is a tremendous amount of stored energy, and must be treated with great care. The benefit of gas struts is they only release that energy relatively slowly though, so it's not too bad. We buried ours inside the frame and latched it with a cross-bar and car trunk latch.

The thing about hanging in 2010, was that it was of such a low point value that it only made sense to do at the last second. Roughly the equivalent of if scaling was only worth 2 points this year. Also, my interpretation of the rules make it so that it wouldn't count. I think the final explanation will be that you have to be up at the end of the match and stay up for 5 seconds for it to count. You really need something like that to be able to judge it, otherwise people would just let their motors back drive at the buzzer.

Every time you put your rewind-structure on the top of the bot and your students started cranking, we joked about what they must have done to make you hate them so much