[Tristan Lall]

Thanks to everyone for the compliments. It's always a pleasure to be of assistance—inspectors, as much as anyone, want to see every robot competing.

There's one little semi-related thing that some of you might be scratching your heads about: why was an SMC cylinder being considered? Normally, it wouldn't have been (per the rulebook), but the teams in Canada received an e-mail from FIRST HQ exempting "SMC cylinders, provided they are of identical [stroke] length, bore, and mounting schemes of those on the custom cylinder order form in the back of the Pneumatics Manual." We felt that while this was a deviation from the procedure in <R25>, the teams would expect that they could rely upon that e-mail, and make purchasing and design decisions on that basis.

Conveniently, SMC Canada has a warehouse in the vicinity of the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, which enabled us to refer several teams directly to them, when their robots' pneumatics were incompliant.