The following are pictures of the actual hoops to be used in the arena. The following contraption will be fixed and the robot will have to push the lever like handle(the rectangular panel) to release the ball from the cylinder.

Hard coding refers to the software development practice of embedding input or configuration data directly into the source code of a program or other executable object, or fixed formatting of the data, instead of obtaining that data from external sources or generating data or formatting in the program itself with the given input.