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During the building period, we also tried building an extension out of tent poles, tape measures, and other methods, but eventually scrapped it because we did not want to risk entanglement and we did not have enough weight. On Thursday and Friday at the Cleveland regional, we hacksawed off our ball mechanism, and the extra weight allowed us to use an extension. We built the extension during the qualifying matches on Friday using a tape measure.
We did not "blatantly disregard FIRST's rulings on extensions" (ie. the yahoo group message that said no to tape measures) as some people have said in other posts. In fact, we wanted to build the tape measue extension before that message was posted, but scrapped it when we saw it. It was only after we realized that FIRST was allowing them did we actually build it. Some people have said that the teams with extensions have an unfair advantage because they did not follow the rules and were rewarded for it, when in fact we did follow the rules.
Please do not 'hate' our team or any other team for having an extension that you feel is or was illegal. If anything, talk to the judges about the ruling if you do not feel it is correct. It is not our team's fault that FIRST reversed their ruling.
To team 192: If you have a tape measure extension, feel perfectly free to use it. It is legal under the rules, and if any team feels negatively about you for using it, their anger is misguided. You have done nothing wrong.
My comments on FIRST's ruling for repairing and improving components after a regional: I believe that this rule is entirely too vague. For example, team 192 is technically improving their extension by bulding an entire new one that is faster and lighter than their current one. In our case, we built our extension at the regional, and then improved it when we came home.
In addition, any robot can really be split into 4 or less extremely general components: the latch mechanism, the ball mechanism, the extension, and the drive train. If a team has all 4 of those components, but none of them work, could they technichally completely redesign each of these and qualify them as "improvements"? I'm not sure. I think FIRST should either allow teams to do anything to the robot after competitions, or only allow teams to repair the robot.
BTW, if any team wants to build a tape measure extension, we would be more than happy to show you ours on Thursday at nationals. The extension is fast (25' in 4-5 seconds), reliable, weighs about 2.5 lbs, and can probably be built in about 2 hours. You could have it done before the qualifying matches begin on Friday.
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