[ngreen]

I think elgin and chrish hit a lot of good points.

FIRST is working to give us the safest and most effective parts they can give us. At the pneumatics meeting we talked about a compressor that weighed 1/3 the weight but wasn't as fast at recycling. We talked about lighter accumulators more like a PVC type. We talked about more accumulators. These things are all taken into consideration. Most of all FIRST wants us to be safe and follow good design practices.

And this is about design. I always love to see what new things teams come up with. I've been proud to have suction (non-pneumatic) this last year, and multi-position actuators the previous. It took some thought but worked out great in both cases. Elgin really gets to this one. Do you want it to be the best robot or the best engineered. Like Dave said at Atlanta. We are going to have a certain amount of parts we can use on Mars and we've got to make them work. We can't go to the hardware store and buy it completely finished and ship to Mars. Same here. I like some freedom. But the constraints make the game interesting. IMHO.