Having recently participated in a full redesign of my team's pit, I can tell you what we prioritized. I'll spare you the full history, but over the past half year or so, my team has had the fortune of working with one of our sponsors on a full pit redesign.
Above all, our primary goal was to keep everything clean-- your pit is both your work area and your face at competitions, and a dirty, disorganized, or otherwise unappealing pit doesn't reflect well on your team. We tried to keep as much as possible off of the floor at all times possible. This was achieved through cabinets hanging on our back wall, storage on the robot cart, and two rolling workbenches. The drawers on these workbenches were labelled with exactly what goes in them, in order to manage where our tools are and make it easy to find what we're looking for. The cabinets were primarily used to keep personal items such as backpacks and jackets, as well as the computer driving our display off of the floor and out of our way. There is nothing as irritating or unsafe as tripping over wires, so our pit has a truss system that keeps all of our cabling (lights, monitor cables, battery power) our of the way. We run two powerstrips, one of which resides inside the truss while the other lives attached to the side of our battery cart.
Our second priority was easy of setup-- if you can't set up a pit, no matter how good or functional it looks in your shop, it is of no use. We use a custom truss system developed by our sponsor, Skyline Exhibits, but many other teams use PVC pipe, aluminum extrusion, or other like materials. Another possibility is a tent-like "roof." We used to use one of these, but we had to modify it to let in enough light to work safely in. If an inspector has to pull out a flashlight in your pit (no joke, I've seen it happen), you aren't safe and probably need some sort of lighting. We cut holes in our awning, and that worked well. As a subpoint of this
for the love of Gaff, if your pit is in any way complicated, set it up beforehand at home. In addition to the practice you get, you can also see what will and will not work at competition. Plus, more practice means getting it all up faster at competition, which is absolutely huge. If you need a ladder(s)
do not count on the venue having them; bring them yourself.
Our tertiary priority was making it look good. Part of this was covered in our first goal, but we have some extra considerations-- our team's motto is "Lighting up robotics," so we have large light strips on the front pillars of our pit. It is really good to make your pit somehow reflect your team's "theme," if it has one. In addition to being cool to see, it also makes your team seem more professional (and makes it more likely that you'll win something like the Imagery Award). Our team has three 9' banners for each the front and sides of our pit, as well as a large flat-screen TV on the front showing a slideshow of our sponsors and team activities. We would not have any of these things if they got in our way when working on the robot-- the only reason we keep them in our pit is that they are 10' in the air, and far out of our way. That being said, if you want flashy things, you
will pay for it in setup time, so be prepared and, as earlier mentioned,
practice.
Here's an imgur album of our pit (excuse the shaky cam, they were taken on my phone. hopefully we'll be able to do a more comprehensive write up on our pit later-- it certainly has generated quite a bit of interest at our regionals!):
http://imgur.com/a/evZZQ
These were all taken late on Thursday, if I remember correctly, so things aren't fully in position and I don't have a good picture of the robot cart. Like I said, hopefully we'll be able to get some good pictures of it after the season ends (or before St. Louis). This pit (along with our theme of lighting things up) contributed to us winning the Imagery Award at each of the Regionals we attended this year (Lake Superior and North Star).
If you have any further questions, I'd be happy to answer them!