Some additional details.....
There was an ongoing "discussion" among students, engineers, and teachers on the team about our effectiveness with the old gripper. It was very hard to align the robot+arm when picking up, but it was nice when jousting at the top of a goal. I was convinced we just needed more practice. We had done well with it in practice, and we had gotten as many as 4 tetras during a match. Not great, but, but, with a little more practice.....
The "lets ditch the gripper" camp was making noises about switching, and one of our students wrote me a letter saying in essence "we don't need more practice, we need a better robot." I was saddened, angered, and, uh, convinced. So I walked up to the scouting station where this student was working and laid down MY gauntlet: Give me a new arm, make sure it works, make sure we fit in the box, GET TO WORK.
A subset of our team pretty much took off all of the "cool" parts on the arm, leaving a piece of aluminum tubing, then mounted a tetra stop made of aluminum scrap and polycarb from the hardware store.
By the end of the day Saturday, it was working pretty well....
Still giddy,
Ken
Edit: It will NOT get thrown away. Its a legit spare that we might need (not the cool parts just the stick). I have a special place for such discarded parts - this place rhymes with "Hall of Fame".