Build Space
 

Hi FIRST community, I was simply wondering where your team spends the six weeks of build season.

I wanna see some statistics about this matter to see the most popular build spaces. Thanks.

Re: Build Space
 

I selected "School Space", but 2175 actually shares a school space that belongs to another local team, 3130. We helped get this team started last year and they were kind enough to allow us to share their shop space.

A virtual tour of the shop shared by 2175 and 3130 can be found here:
http://robotics.mnmsa.org/media_photosynths.php

The shop itself is used during the day by the school, but the teams have permanent storage space in some of the closets off the shop and in the space upstairs.

Re: Build Space
 

We use 3 classrooms at our school. 1 is the build room. All of our tools and building materials in it. 2 is the Programing Room. It has computers, and electronics. 3 is one of the computer labs that is actually used during the school day so that is were most of our marketing team does their work and where our team meets at the beginning of each meeting to talk about what we are doing.

Re: Build Space
 

We have 17,000 sq feet. There is a main room 45x20 with four 12x12 offices off it and a 20x20 break room. There is a full height (24') warehouse space for VEX and FRC builds. Some pictures are here Team 1640 open house and more to come.

For 2011 we are one of the haves. I hope we don't squander it. Downingtown Area School District ROCKS!!!

Re: Build Space
 

Over the past 3 years we've been bounced around quite a bit. Originally, we used an old, unused auto shop storage room in our 9th grade campus. After the first year, we were moved into a band/choir uniform storage space, which was then turned into a classroom last year... so we moved again into an usused art dark room (there are a lot of unused rooms, levies ran out and thus budget cuts = class cuts). We renovated it and probably will keep it from now on, as it's conveniently right next to the tech shop of our coach and to the CAD computer lab.

Re: Build Space
 

Where we build now is property of the Rochester City School District but it is not on school grounds. It is located in a public building that the City School District uses for special programs. We share the space with two rookie teams.

Re: Build Space
 

We build in the school's metal shop, but have to have everything put away every day... Into a tiny little storage closet without much room for anything at all! (In the 1950s, it was a shower. In the 1990s, it was a storage/dressing room for the school plays).

All in all, we have it better than some and worse than others.

Re: Build Space
 

Exploding Bacon has built in:
A mentors garage/another mentors living room-2006 & 2007/team became to big
A Sheriffs horse barn-2008/Now torn down
Another mentors bigger garage-2009/drove mentor crazy, decided to move out to save his sanity
An abandoned 10,000 square foot pill manufacturing building-2010/Now torn down
Tentatively building on one of our sponsors properties-2011

We have a lot of experience moving our equipment :cool:

Re: Build Space
 

We have some space donated to us by our major sponsor, Chrysler.

We work at the Chrysler Tech Center in Auburn Hills, which happens to be one of the largest buildings in the world (it has its own freeway exit). We have a tiny bit of space in the south wing (where most of the labs are).

Our primary shop used to to be a little notch out of the road (a road runs through the first floor of the building), which used to hold electric forklifts for charging. Many years ago, they decided they didn't want to hold electric forklifts there anymore, so we had a wall put in and now we have a shop. What is nice is that we have a lot of power for tools, shop air, and can do stuff in the hallway (road) as long as we watch for cars. It isn't very big, but it is ours and we can keep anything we want in there. We also have a large assortment of manual machines, most of which were being discarded by labs, including a large manual mill, lathe, and many bandsaws and drill presses. We can also access many tools in other areas of the building (4' jump shear, more lathes and mills, welding equipment, and CNC machines), if we arrange ahead of time. We call this room "The Botcave".

Our other room, the CAD room, is a room that used to contain a lot of vending machines. It now contains 7 workstations, a server, all of the PR stuff, and a table for making antennae.

We also have access to a basement under the NVH (noise vibration harshness) lab across the hall from the botcave, where we store old robots and build our practice field. We have a full field of carpet, but no border around it.

We can also use a conference room, but it is not ours so we clean it at the end of every day. We begin and end our meetings here, eat here, and use the GIANT floor-ceiling whiteboards here.

Re: Build Space
 

This is essentially exactly what Shaker's build space is, though we have a multipurpose room and a metal / wood shop. It's rather annoying to not be able to leave a single thing out and losing stuff into the void that is Shaker's closet. We never have trouble storing parts in the pits at competitions because it's more room than we have for our stuff!

It takes about 20 minutes to take everything out and 20 minutes to put it back... leaves us at about an hour and a half to actually do anything!

However, we've got a nice shop full of neat manual tools, including a x-y mill, a few lathes and drill presses, and a horizontal bandsaw.

Re: Build Space
 

I know exactly how you feel...

20 minutes?!? I start harassing students to start cleaning up an hour before 'close time'... And even then we end up with far too much stuff in "homeless hardware" instead of put back proper the way it should be!

Re: Build Space
 

We get to work in our school's two tech rooms (both equipped with a full set of computers and tools), as well as the graphic tech room for making buttons. Thankfully the teachers that use those rooms are our staff advisors, so we get a little bit of freedom in how we leave things (since I have the first class of the day in there I sometimes leave the programming laptops out to do their thing overnight)

Re: Build Space
 

I can honestly say team 103 is completely blessed with our build space:

1. An art room that seconds as a computer lab
Our main mentor is an art teacher, and this room is where we eat every night also. Its a good sized room with many tables and a small computer lab station on the far side.

2. An Animation, "back room"
This room was actually designed as a art storage closet for the art room, but we put some computers back there (Along with all of the snacks) and it becomes the animation room. It is about 20' x12', so not big at all, but extremely useful! This size is including all of the space the cabinets lining 2 of the 4 walls in the room.

3. A full computer lab
This lab has about 25 of the most powerful computers in the school, and is a good sized room. It is adjacent to the shop, and where our inventor crew work, and where our mechanical team designs.

4. A full sized shop
The shop is about 25' x 40' which includes 2 mills, 2 lathes, a cnc router table, 4 band saws, and various other tools. Connected to this is a small room with a lot of cabinets for storage.

5. A 40' x 60', "Barn."
In here we create a full-sized field every year. We have huge cabinets along one of the long walls, holding all of our past years and current years equipment along with all of our fundraiser items. On the far wall, we usually have a collage of 18 years of team stuff. It was actually built for us about 6 years ago because we had to use one of the schools gyms (which, coincidentally, the football team "needed"). So the school built our team this barn, and it has served us EXTREMELY WELL!!!! :D

Any questions pm me.

Re: Build Space
 

Keep in mind this is the preseason where we only have one mechanism to work on ("practice" drive base). During build, it's just a massive time sink.

We don't really have ROOM to be organized, it's rather annoying!

Re: Build Space
 

Apparently my programming mentors started a hackerspace around here... I guess I can go there too. But our tech shop at school is the main place