More prototyping

Last week, during our post-competition discussion, we made a list of problems we'd encountered during competition so that we could work on solving them.  During the competition, our left front motor had failed, and something was also wrong with the servo on the crate-grabbing mechanism.  Also, sometimes balls from the conveyor didn't make it into the crates on the scissor lift.
We wanted to fix the left front motor and servo on the crate grabber, make the ball chute less steep (so balls from the conveyor actually make it into the crates), and make a new or modified crate-grabbing mechanism.  We easily fixed the left front motor by adding some spacers, and today we fixed the servo as well.

Since we have a few weeks until the next competition, we're concentrating on prototyping the new mechanisms for grabbing crates.  We have several designs, including a slight modification of our current "tomahawk," two different types of mechanisms for squeezing crates, and a little pincher that goes on the back of the scissor lift to get crates that way.

We hope to finish our major modifications to the robot in the next few weeks, so that we can concentrate on driver practice.  We'll also need to work on some more autonomies before San Diego.