Post Your Workshop pic/s

[GreyingJay]

We definitely had to get creative for this first year. Our community team met in multiple places.

Our local library has been a fantastic sponsor, offering us the use of their multipurpose community room. It is a great classroom with two projectors, tables and chairs. We used it in the off season for team building, brainstorming, workshops, open houses, fabrication of a KOP drive train - anything that involved only hand tools and not making a lot of noise or a lot of mess. We were even able to stretch that a little bit when they offered the use of the room for drive practice - did you know that plywood defenses leave splinters all over the place?

Our second partnership was with the community recreation complex. They offered us access to the upstairs lobby area, overlooking the swimming pool and the fitness centers. We turned this into open, classroom style space for software, business, and some drivetrain work. Downstairs, in a storage area behind the gymnasiums, they gave us the use of a 6'x10' storage cage where we kept all our tools and robot parts, and the use of the rest of the back area to do fabrication work and set up our bench tools: a drill press, a miter saw, and a compressor.

Finally, one of our mentors got us access to a company lounge in the building he works at, giving us another space where we could work on the robot or the software, with 24/7 availability. As Bag and Tag approached, we started working at the recreation complex, and when they closed at 10pm, we moved everything here for late night assembly, wiring, and testing sessions.

We became very good at packing up the essential tools and bringing them to one of these areas for practices and work sessions. One fun side effect was the amount of attention we gathered as folks doing their workouts, or kids coming for tae kwon doe lessons, would watch us progress and cheer us on from week to week.

While we are extremely grateful to all of our sponsors, we are hoping to find something a little more permanent that we can settle into and set up some shop/storage space!