Where do YOU practice driving?

Where does your team practice driving? If you do not belong to a school, what does your facility offer? If you are at a school, how much room are you allotted?

Thanks!

[Alan Anderson]

The TechnoKats build space and workshop includes a full-sized practice field.

[plnyyanks]

If we're lucky enough to have a practice space with the proper dimensions, we'll practice there. We also practice at the school in the main atrium-like space. It's got plenty of room for practising driving. If space and time permit, we like to get as close to a full field as possible set up (at minimum, the major elements) to use as well.

Does your school allow for a set up field somewhere, or must you erect and take down your field each time?

[plnyyanks]

We usually (not in my memory) don't have a full field up in the school; just the important elements (i.e. this year, we just had a few movable scoring pegs). We have to take everything back down and store it overnight in the workshop, so we can't set up anything permanent in the school.

Thanks!

[CalTran]

We, this year, used the atrium of the facility we were building in. Since we couldn't set up anything permanent, we usually just had a roll of carpet and a mobile rack of scoring pegs.

[fsgond]

We are lucky to have space in our machine shop to build the entire field, if we wanted. We usually build about half the field, but have in the past built almost an entire one. The main thing to skimp on is walls, everything else is usually critical to the game.

[Peter Matteson]

Over the years we have frequently had to find new places to practice.

We have used all of the following in my years of mentoring:
High school wrestling room 03, 05, 07, 08, 09, 10
Unused factory space at our primary sponsor 04, 06
Disused firehouse that the town hasn't sold yet 11-?

We do all our quick testing in the hall outside the classroom/shop where we build at the high school, and it has the scars to show it...

[Derek012]

One of our sponsors Wrabacon, is a metal workship that the owner lets our team Infinite Loop use for building and driving, but we use one of the schools in our district to host the offseason event we host Mainely Spirit!

[jwfoss]

2168 rolls out a carpet and sets up an approximate half field in the main hall of the school, and picks it up at the end of the night. We are looking to get our own space or locate other areas in town that will allow us to keep the field set up.

[sgreco]

My old team (2079) uses the school's gym when we need a lot of space. They've also used the cafeteria before. (of course all of this is when the rooms aren't occupied by anyone else). Otherwise they have a big enough lab space to test some robot functions, though not in a full size field environment.

[Brandon Holley]

For small range testing, we will use our shop. However anything that requires driving at anything more than a crawl we move to Northeastern's student center.

It tends to be a pain because we have to bring the robot, controls, batteries, field elements and team members to another building on campus. However, at least we have the ability to drive at full speed every now and then.

-Brando

[thefro526]

We're lucky enough to have space to setup a full practice field for the later weeks of build at our school. Usually, we'll start setting it up around week 3 or so and it's torn down a few days after ship.

There's a picture of our field in this post: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...81&postcount=9

[apalrd]

We use a portion of a basement at the Chrysler Tech Center. We have a full field length (and almost a full field width) of carpet, so we can do full-length drills and runs, but it's not full width, and this year there was only enough room for one scoring rack. Since nobody else uses this space, we leave it setup all year long. After the kickoff, we will make new game elements, and usually this is completed after the first week or so.

We also have a rack setup outside our shop (in the hallway/street), but no carpet. This rack moves around a bit, as we brought it to Tech Plaza (the center of the Chrysler Tech Center) for our ship day party, and we brought the PVC portions to a demo at NDP.

We also had a minibot pole in the basement, and another outside the shop (although we later made another one for in the shop, and one of our mentors built a short pole for his desk)

We sometimes to go AI (where 469's shop is located) across the street, to practice with 469 and 217.