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.

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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!!!

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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

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This is our previous home for a few years before we had to move to ur newest home.
At the far left next to the claw of our 2005 robot is other teams trophies on display in our team Museum the leads to the entrance to our kitchen. Past the kitchen area after you walk past our trophy case of official awards won at FIRST events and under our two National Chairman's banners and our 2008 FLR banner to the left (not pictured would be our PAW room where the website, animation and Promotions including designing our Hall of Fame booth). A little further to the right would be where Drives and Electrical team and the Mechanical team reside in their respective areas (also not pictured). Where all those chairs are is where the main meeting area resides and behind that is where our practice field is right nest to it. Further up towards the back is where our shop resides and our dock door is as well as the back entrance to the shop. Our 2006 robot is on display on a rotating table designed for demos. Behind the robot is our Software team's area. Then you can see the front entrance to the site and finally at the far right of the picture is our 1996 robot. We had all of our robots on display at the site(in various states of functionality) except for our 1992 robot which is in the possession of FIRST and on display at FIRST place.
Since we have moved we sadly had to dispose of some of our robots.

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3450 will be building out of a pair of rooms at our school. They are exclusively ours. We have 2 lofted storage spaces, a small shop room (ironically our mill and lathe are NOT in it) and a "class room" without any desks. We also have a small office and a closet in the hallway between the rooms.

As for tools: Mill, Lathe (both older than any of our mentors but well maintained and in great condition) 3 drill presses, 1 2-ton arbor press, a vertical and horizontal band saw, and a wide variety of hand tools.

My only problem with our shop is that our heating is a little funky. We got the rooms from the school because they weren't in use. Don't know why but the heater doesn't seem to work. It stays above freezing but the average temps are close to 50. If we can't fix it over the winter break we will be investing in some space heaters. (IMHO, a safety related expense)

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There is a horizontal mill in RPI's shop that helped win WWI! Machine tools are truly timeless...

On 1276 our initial shop space looked like this. It was a storage mezzanine until we came along in 2004. In 2005 we annexed the room under it, which gave us a 10x20 or so permanent storage space that we could keep our tools, parts and other stuff, in addition to being a "clean room" for electronics. We were also allowed to use some of the shop classes space as long as we cleaned up after ourselves, which meant that any given meeting there could be 3 or 4 or more subgroups working totally independently of each other.

It would be awesome to have 78's warehouse.

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We are truly blessed to have such a big workspace that we can call ours. The Navy has been very supportive of the team and it's ongoing successes (in less than two years we have gone from 1 FTC team and no FLL teams to now having 2 FTC teams and 7 FLL teams).

The workspace in that old American Robot episode has undergone a dramatic transformation. While this is a more accurate representation of current changes, it is even more different now that we have spent the last several months reorganizing the "cage" workspace to incorporate some old machine tools (a benchtop lathe, mill/drill, and standing drill press) I saved from being tossed by the Navy. There is also a small office out of the picture that we have 5 donated desktops networked together...hoping we can do some decent CAD work this year!

We lack a lot of the wicked fancy machines some other teams have access to, but try to make up for it working within our capabilities and strategy! Anyone in the Newport, RI area is welcome to visit!

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2079 works out of a facility that we rent. I didn't enter anything in the poll since I'm not exactly sure what it would be classified as. In total it's approximately a 4,000 square feet facility. 80% of that is an industrial floor space, and the rest is two office rooms. It works out very well for us. We put code and CAD work the offices, and on the floor space we build. The space is pretty much ideal for a FIRST team. We aren't restricted by school hours or anything. Basically if a mentor is present we can get in. The only problem is it's a little pricey.

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We've got our schools wood shop as our main build area, and thats all we really use. Its got wood cutting tools great for prototyping but all the metal work we do is done by hand, other then the giant metal cutting chop saw we have.

Other rooms we CAN use but don't:

Tech Lab, its got about 15 computers from 1990 that can't do much, and the same tools from the wood shop, jammed into half the space.

CAD Lab, We use for testing the robot on carpet when we need to, and on the rare occasion that we have a CAD team, they go there.

We used to have our old abandoned metal shop, but for no apparent reason they decided to move they weight room into it (???) and now we have a tiny area of it for storage.

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The Grandville RoboDawG teams are very blessed with our build spaces!

In the years before my freshman year, we [288] were in the "Dungeon" of the 6th grade building, with multiple rooms to set stuff up in, build, program, ect., and it was located right next to the tech department. Not too bad of a build area!

Freshman year we needed a new spot, so we moved to a local strip mall where no one had been in ages. we bought 2 slots and were able to have our 2nd team, as well as an almost-full-sized field and a place to eat [apparently metal shrapnels aren't good for your health... Who would have known!]

For the past 2 years, we were able to get the old cafeteria in the old 6th grade building [I say old because it was retired and the 6th graders were moved to elementary schools]. We share the space with the special needs kids who go to school there. Our only major rule was we had to keep the area they had lunch in clean. This will be our 3rd year at this location and now have 3 teams, a full sized field, Lego League storage, our own "cutting/milling" room, Botball storage, and eating area! Its a huge space and we thank Grandville's Admin for allowing us to work there, and we hope to have many more memory filled years there!:D

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We use a metal shop that one of our mentors own. He has built a room for the programmers and all the computers to be used. We have ample space for our small team :).

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Just seeing phrases such as "the 6th grade building" makes me laugh. We have less than 900 students K-12 in our district...

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Wow! I thought our district was small! We have about 750 students in the High School (grades 9-12) and somewhere around 2200 in the district. How many kids are on your team? I have heard from other teams about how rare it is to get 30 kids in our school size on a team, so I could not imagine having that small of a school!

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1551 probably should be part of your rural network or at least should be involved.
They are an upcoming program. President Paul Gudonis told the volunteer crew their story during the Volunteer meeting in Atlanta last year.

Re: Build Space
 

He did? News to me -- that's really cool!

...that said, to answer the question, we have between 25-30 students on the team every year -- more than any other extracurricular activity -- but many of those students are shared. (That is to say, if they bowl, or play basketball, or swim, or are in jazz band, etc., they share their time between extracurricular activities.) We generally have between fifteen and twenty students that do *only* FIRST during the build season, and even those we generally have to share at other times of the year.

It's part and parcel to living in the middle of nowhere!

Re: Build Space
 

Sadly, we have not touched the FIRST Interactive Rural Support network. I asked one of our mentors about a year ago and the only response I received was that, "It was too much work." Although I did not like the outcome of the great program, there was nothing I could do. I have talked to some Alumni about it, but not too much was said. I only stumbled upon it about 2 years ago. I thought it was a really great program, and I wondered why I had never heard of it. Now I see it on the helpful links area on CD. You can see how dated it is by the team structure page.

That is very impressive! I think that the reason for our team having the number it does in this size school is because of our requirements. Students are not allowed to be in basketball, football, the winter musical, or any other winter extracurricular activity for that matter. It is a requirement for team members to dedicate all of their time (minus school, sleep, and doctors appointments) to the robotics team. Although it is tough, I believe that this is what gives our team a little advantage over the other teams. Our students are dedicated to the team, and no exceptions are made.

Re: Build Space
 

Interesting. I feel exactly the opposite is true in our case.

----------------------

It makes me think that most people don't understand what "rural" means. They don't understand that the closest business that employs more than ten full-time people is forty miles away. They don't understand that a run to Home Depot or Lowes is a 45-mile round-trip. They don't get that finding students willing to dedicate their winter only to FIRST is, by and large, a pipe dream...

It is for this reason that I founded my non-profit to promote FIRST through the rural Southern Tier and Finger Lakes region. In spite of all the challenges, there is no reason why every rural school should not have a FIRST team.

Re: Build Space
 

Are you sure we are not on the same team? This sounds very much like us! :p And I respect your view on the topic very much.

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We could be on the same team, but it sounds like you're a bit too big-city metropolitan for us. :D

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we have a little over 500 kids in our high school, but we are a private school.

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7-12 we have about 500. And we're a public school. :D

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we used to use the school until two years ago when on weekends the administration decided we must pay a janitor $60.an hour to unlock the door and sit even when the shop teacher was there.
We began packing up all we needed for the weekend on Friday,going to The Knights of Pythias basement do what we could and bringing it all back Monday.

This year do to other issue with the school we will be building at the Knight,with the ability to come and go as we wish.

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Team 1519 meets in our coaches basement. Imagine two decent sized living rooms and a small, small bedroom to build in! One room was designated as our meeting area with a few computers, white board, and all the FLL stuff which contained no building/materials and was strictly meeting/FLL. The second room was where all the magic happened. It had all of our stuff in boxes everywhere with a little bit of floor space to build robots. The small unfinished room was our shop which had a chop saw, table saw, grinder, drill press, band saw, and all the hand tools. One funny memory was cleaning up in our build room and finding a marble fire place behind the piles of lexan and plywood! :) :p

Team 3467 uses the school's shop with access to our own large closet and CAD classroom since our coach is the teacher.

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My team has been very fortunate to have been able to build our robot in a local machine shop. The shop has been very generous to us!

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The school 2175 is from has about 300 from 6-12 and is a public school. My graduating class was 27 students. These small numbers come from being a charter school however, and not from being in a rural area.

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Haha. I understand. Then I guess you are too rural to be a part of the FIRST Interactive Rural Support Network! ;)

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We are grades 9-12 and in the city.

How many kids do you have on your team?

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25-30 every year.

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816 has always worked out of our Schools Pre-Engineering Classroom, though we've occasionally annexed other classrooms for our use. ;)

Connected to that classroom are two more rooms, one of which is probably about 15'x15' which will be used for prototyping, programming and some other tasks, while the second room which is about 15'x30' houses all of our tools and is where we build the robot.

Depending on the year we'll either setup a partial field in one of the large unused rooms in the school or setup a full field in our "atrium".

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573 has been in the back of an architecture classroom since 2001. About a third of the room is filled with boxes, spare parts, robots, shop tools, and trophies. We have been able to get plenty of work done, but we have always had to take stuff out and put it back for every meeting.

After asking for years(and another issue best left untold), we are finally moving out. Our school has given us a few rooms in the bowels of the school. There are currently walls dividing the space up into four rooms, but we have already contracted somebody to remove them. Despite the location, everything about the room will be great. We will have more space to work and store items. Also, we will not have to put tools and parts away at the end of each meeting. With the extra space, we will also be able to look into acquiring a few more shop tools. Hopefully, the walls will be knocked down and we will be ready to move sometime in the next week.

Re: Build Space
 

For Team 811, we have what we call FIRSTbase in the first floor of an outbuilding of a local hospital. We've been blessed for our 10 years to have this space donated by the hospital (it helped that one of our school's alums was on the hospital board when we were looking for space!), and we usually have access to another building that has enough carpeted space to set up at least part of a field.

FIRSTbase is just under a mile from our school, a private college prep school of about 900 students. Being college prep, the school doesn't have ANY shops (other than maintenance), so we've had to build our tool inventory ourselves. To date we have a small mill, metal lathe, band saw, horizontal band saw, drill press, table saw, chop saw, belt sander, grinder, and bunches of cordless and hand tools. Wiring has a full compliment of electrical tools, and the computing power of the facility is fairly robust.

Our 25-40 team members per year manage quite well, considering that (lacking shop classes) we have to teach everything to new members annually. (No, there are no robotics classes in the school. :( )

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Pssh that's nothing our HS/MS combined has about 250-300. Yeah we're small lol. We currently have 4 kids on the team and about 4-5mentors. Just getting kids is difficult. Gotta love the rural areas :).

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Quit complaining about small school size. Hope Chapel Academy (team 330) has about 200-300 students, K-12. The team typically has 7-10 students.

Build site: the warehouse area of an old grocery store. Tool crib is a freezer, practice field is most of the shop. Works pretty well.

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Who's complaining? I *love* my small, rural school, and the direct impact that FIRST has had on the population. (Last year, 54% of the senior class went on to college specifically for science and engineering fields.)

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340 has been lucky with our build facilities. Our first 3 years we bounced around different area's of our first sponsor, Nortel Networks, in the City of Rochester. It was nice because back in 2000 there were only a couple of teams in Rochester so we could draw kids from other schools that didn't have FIRST teams.

In 2003 the school opened our MST wing. We have 3 dedicated computer labs, 1 large workspace with computers, a middle school shop with band saws, drill presses, and sanders, a standard tech shop, and our own Robotics room with an old Bridgport Mill, a tig Welding area, and a small metal lathe. We have spent a lot of time this year getting the space organized exactly the way we want for build season.

I know we are lucky. It's nice because we can work on projects all year round and kids can do side projects during thier engineering classes and study halls. The wing was mainly built because of the successes of our PLTW classes and our FIRST team. At one point we had 3 teams working in this space, our 2 teams and a neighboring school that wasn't allowed to work in their school on weekends.

We have about 1200 students 9-12.

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for a long time, 1124 was lucky enough to have some warehouse space in a nearby factory, and last year, we had the entire place to ourselves. now, though, the leaser (that a word?) of the building says we can't be there any more. now, the hunt is on for a new space

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Well, I wish you the best of luck with that. I cannot imaging having to move all of the equipment and tools you guys have. I hope you find a place, and I hope it fits all of your needs!

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I've been meaning to post in this thread for a while, but for some reason never got around to it.

1071 first off has our build space at our school. First off we have our own shop. Originally when our school had a metal shop program, our team operated out of a closet in the wood shop. When the metal shop program got discontinued, they were about to take away the shop and renovate it into something else. We the team however had told them we still needed the machine, so the school gave us half of the existing metal shop (its a big room) along with all the tools and supplies, and machines left over from the shop. (The other half of the room is now the nurses/medical classes room).

In addition to building out of the metal shop, we also still use our schools wood shop. Since we retained our closet in it, we get a lot of use out of it. Since it is bigger and we have more space, the final robot assembly normally takes place here, as well as any wood working that needs to take place. It really becomes an extension of our shop, espically on weekends and vacations when we don't need to pack up.

The best thing about our team, is that in addition our room, and the wood shop, we are the only group at WHS that has a complete run of the Building. Thats right, if there is a room in the high school that we need to use, we can use it. This really is what makes the team happen.

Rooms we often use are:
- Auditorium (has a large open space in the back about half an FRC field) for running the robot/programming
- Graphics Lab - Photoshop/video work that needs to be done
- CAD Lab - some CAD work done, but mostly used just as a computer lab/office for chairmans team, business team, and for the all the paperwork with WIWI
-Misc Classrooms - In addition to our head mentors classroom, we use other area classrooms to conduct meetings and training sessions, as well as weekend lunches.

And as I said before, If it's a room our high-school has, we can probably more then likely use it.

I must say we are one lucky team!!

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Our team uses an old workshop that was used for auto repair classes in previous years, and occasionally we head down the hall to the woodshop to use the drill press and such. Our problem though is that the room is way too small, and we can only really use half of it because the biotech class has all their stuff in the room as well.
Nothing fancy at all, but we are second years with no funding, so that's expected.

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we didn't have everything in that place, it was more of a practice field and not building area (at least in my experience there), but that practice field will be missed

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Well, at least that is good. Good luck anyway!

103 had a huge stroke of luck about 7 years ago now.

We had to use one of our schools full gyms during the season. Every night our team would set up a part of the field in the gym, and at the end of the night we had to take it down so it could be used the next day. There were huge complications with our football team and practicing in that gym, so the school board (with the football teams money) Built us that barn I was talking about before, with a full sized field in it and cabinets lining one of the long walls. That building has been a gigantic help over the years, saving us thousands of hours of time of setting up and taking down.

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In years past, we have always built in the garage of one of our mentors. This year, we have rented a small commercial space in the back of a shopping strip near our school.

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Team 1795 has met in various closets and classrooms in the school for the past four years. We feel fortunate to have been given the HVAC closet, because a) it is bigger than the classroom closets and b) it won't move each year with the coach's classroom. My goal is to get heavy enough equipment in that room so that the administration will never be able to move us again!

This year we are fortunate to have the Freeside Atlanta hackerspace as a sponsor. They have a warehouse space with lots of tables set up and some woodworking and machine tools.



they have this beatiful lathe too

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2052 has been meeting in our school's CAD lab (attached to the woodshop) for about 3 years now.

We get an average sized walk-in closet to store our equipment in, we can (usually) use the woodshop for whatever we need, and we get free reign on the computers so long as we are following the district's computer use policy.

We have been outgrowing our closet (and the computers are an incredibly huge distraction), so we have explored other options, but we will likely be in this room for a number of years to come.

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Rooms E16 and E11 at the school :)

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Hello,
My team (the MHS SuburBots) works in one of the classrooms in the science hallway of our school. Since there are only ten members (half of which are either goofballs or control freaks) and four mentors (only two of which show up on a regular basis), it feels like too much space most of the time. This feeling has only increased since they added a smart-board (which those goofballs were quick to discover was excellent at playing mini-clip games) at the end of last year.
As for storage, we have six cabinets locked and reserved for us, along with a backroom where what's left of past years' robots rests.
The best thing about the room is all the power outlets. There are two at every table, along with dozens along the walls and above the counters. We're never short on places to plug laptops into.

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1647 uses Seneca High School to house most our equipment and robotics needs. We have a electrical room, CAD room, broadcast/photo room, woodshop, auto shop, and cafeteria that comes to good use. In the electrical room, most of the robot build goes on in here. Also, there is a small closet where most of our things are stored during the season. In the CAD room, most of the design and programming is done here. The broadcast/photo room is where our videos are produced and the website is built. The woodshop and autoshop is only used to cut materials for prototypes or the robot. Lastly, the cafeteria is where we eat lunch on Saturdays (...obviously) and practice driving when we don't have a field to practice on. (Dustin :D)

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Team 2504 uses 5 areas of our school.

#1. 1/2 of our schools renovated auto shop (we did the work with the help of another mentor), It's a good size - 55 x 22ft. We do most of our construction, electrical work and machining in this area.

#2. A small storage room off to the side of our auto shop which we store our snacks, books and binders. We also use this as a rest area for our assembly and electrical teams during the season.

#3. My Co-Advisors class room. We use this room for meetings, dinners and our parents night it also houses our Public Relations group.

#4. A Building and construction class room. We use this area to build our field parts, robot crate and robot cart.

#5. Our schools metal shop. We use this area for plasma cutting, welding and turning long shafts which our small lathe cannot accommodate.

Once every two weeks or so we also get the BAE mobile machine shop to stop by our school and mill out some components for us.

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461 seems blessed in this case; we have a large wood shop with bandsaw, tablesaw, welding rooms, and a 4'x4' CNC router. attached to that is a meeting room with a 35 computer lab. all of the computers are outfitted with autodesk and 3ds.