[who716]

our team as well went with the el Toro design, we had a lot of trouble in the beginning gripping the ball as we started with just surgical tubing wrapped around some 1/2 pvc and this did not work, we then went to try a numerous amount of other materials with minimal success, then I went home went onto YouTube and saw a team using bane bot on the end of there sticks, the next day I tried this and was very surprised at how well it worked, we eventually also switched from pvc to solid aluminum shaft we further increased our success of the mechanism. while at our scrimmage event it worked great allowed for quick pickup and release and increased maneuverability of the ball. even when the sticks got bent from another robot running into it, it still worked for the rest of the match, we have spares incase something really bad happened and we have it so that a clamp collar is all that is needed to remove the stick from the motors as we fabricated our own adapters. the mechanism pivots up and down with a snow blower motor, to keeps it out of danger as much as possible, and the stick are powered by pg71 motors until we broke one then we had a pg71 and a pg 27 powering them and this worked great we tried two pg 27 and it was slower then what we liked. We bought more pg71's so that we can switch it back before our districts.