Pit design, setup, and organization tips

[HelloRobot]

Hello friends!

My team is very excited to go to the Smoky Mountain Regional this year (1st weekend of April). We've been working hard on our robot these last two weeks, but we also need to start planning for SMR, and getting our spirit, buttons, and pit together. I would like our pit to be more than just a frame with a banner. So, I was wondering, when do you usually finalize your pit design, what's the most effective way of organizing it, and when should we have all our pit materials together?

[221Sarahborg]

We redid our pit last year and we had a separate team designing what it should look like. We make ours out of a pvc frame (open on the bottom and front, but cross bars and an outline on the top, left, right, and back) and to stick with jaguars for our name, we went a weird forest route but there's a canopy on the top which restricts some light, so we have two strips of lights that have casings but are actually LED to light up our work area.

We have a table that sits in the back, our tool chest on one side, and a pvc folding cart on the other that holds other things in drawers in the bottom and other stuff like our driver station when we set it down. On both the cart and tool chest we have monitors that are set up, one playing video/pictures of our robot either from a previous regional or from testing and the other with scouting/match schedules.

I don't know about the best way to organize it, since your team should organize how they feel best, but we have a main room that our school gives us and our pit is always set up in there. We don't work on it when building or fixing, but it's set up for tools and other things, that way come competition time when you're in a hurry you're already aware of where that would be in the space that you have.

Good luck at SMR!

[dipmeinaluminum]

Team 333 starts chatting about pit design and layout around meow. the hardest part for us is where to put our coats, jackets, and bags. We also believe that our ENTIRE set up should be able to fit inside the old FRC Totes. Build the pit inside your classroom and do a dry run of EVERYTHING. Hope this helps.