Pit crews, how many students?

[Squirrelrock]

Originally Posted by JosephM

Should also throw one more thing out there: the pit crew should also have two people who can answer questions from judges who roam the pits. <- hint hint

It would probably work better if everyone on your team could answer the judges questions, instead of haveing one person dedicated to doing that job. I think it might impress the judges a little more, also.

[Qoute=iCurtis] ... softwarical ...[/quote]

if it wasn't a word then, it is now.

[Kyle]

Here is the break down that we do on MOE, I know we shouldn't really talk about people in the pits, sparky knows what i am talking about...,
1 student from
Electrical
Programing
Pneumatics
Drive train
Arm
Lifter
and i think 2 students from general mechanical stuff

Also we have between 2-4 ambassadors for the judges.
I know thats about 10 people and can get to be alot, so when the bot is looked at after the match and there is no programing problem, out they go and etc..

[Alex Cormier]

we have a few mentors from drives, electrical and then 2 students or 3 from each sub team like drives, electrical and elevation. also have one pit crew chief which i was last year and will be at Nats, i will be training fellow juniors on how to do the Pit Crew Chiefs job so they can do it next year when I'm off to college. good luck everyone!

[Pat234]

On 234 we have about 10 people in the pits throughout the competition

2 manufacturing students
1 electronics student
1 programmer
2 engineers
4 students to talk to judges and run errands around the pit area.

Throughout the competition we have scouts and strategy team students in and out of the pits and more manufacturing students and engineers if there are major problems that need to be fixed.

[EOC]

Team 1208 has a 6 member pit crew.
2 mechanical team members
1 electrical team member
1 programming team member
1 total system expert
1 jack-of-all-trades/gofer

[Mark Pettit]

I know that all teams are different. Our team is a "club activity" so we have to allow any student to participate that wants to. As such, we have a number of students who have no clue about our own robot, let alone about the ideals of FIRST. We do not allow these students to meander around our pit area at all since we don't want them talking about things they don't know about with judges or anyone else that happens by. Only the most dedicated members are allowed to hang in our pit and even then we occasionally ask them to go elsewhere when things get crowded.
We designate certain students to talk to judges and we rehearse them so that we are sure that we know what they're going to say.
It sounds good to allow everyone to talk to judges but, at least on our team, that is a pretty unrealistic scenario.

[Pi Is Exactly 3]

Our pit crew consists of our drive team, coach, and human player plus one other student. We also have our mentors present.

[Goobergunch]

We usually have everybody in/around the pits, but given that almost everybody on the team knows about the robot (and how it works) and that we have a pretty small team, we usually manage to squeeze in.

It also helped last year that we had a corner pit area, which meant a bit more room for overflow. We might have to exclude a few people this year....

[DarMagi]

Hi, lol well with all of 10 people or so on our team... we are all in the pits, we all have to do a little of everything, and since we have no laptops available for programming, we usually bring a whole desktop with cart - more room gone! so we balance about 10 people in the pits and that includes operators but this year is glad to say we have enough people to have a dedicated scout/picture taker, lol so good luck to her, and it seems like we may have about 8 people or so actually show up at the competition this is some fun stuff here, the pits rock!

[tiffany34990]

Because of always the lack of space for S.P.A.M. we have a small pit crew. We like to put in the best workers obviously. This year I basically picked out the main crew and there is four of us. We have 3 extras that come when they are told. I allowed for the students that are in the main pit crew to have 2 hrs off. However, this is just the mechanical/electrical crew. Our software team has it's own crew that step in to do their end.

[Alyna]

But what I want to know is wether or not trading pit members is legal, i.e. if they as for a pre set list, and a member has a pit pass, are tehy allowed to be there? stupid question I know but Ive only done this once.

[Billfred]

Essentially, any team members you can safely squeeze into your pit area are allowed in the pits. The only restricted area on the floor is the field itself, which requires a team operator badge.

You can rotate your crew, have the same people there the whole time, or set it up however else you can think of.

[bhweezer]

We have 4-5 students who stay in the pits. Plus we have 3-4 engineers in the pits at all times. Other than that we have 3-4 people outside our pit ready to talk with anyone who has question about our team or robot.

[danield710]

for our team it doesnt neccesarily depend on how many (although we dont want our whole team in the pit), but on what they are doing,...

you are gonna want people who know the robot inside and out so if something happens to it they know where and how to fix it, these people should be the ones who pretty much spent the most time building the robot and who are the most skilled with all the tools...on our team its about five people (a mix of students and mentors)

you are also gonna want a battery person whos single job is to charge the batteries and place them securely in the bot(i remember an incident last year where one of our drivers was about to kill his little brother because he forgot to place the battery securely in the bot)

we also have one or two programmers in the pit to test various things on the bot

and on the outskirts of the pit we usually have people who answer questions for judges and hand out brochures to various teams who come for scouting

we also try to have a cycle to rotate newcomers to competiton, we try to give them some time in the pits so they can see wat competition is like...although we dont want to scare them away when tragedy strikes and the pit turns into a hectic place where a race is on to fix the bot before the next match

[Conor Ryan]

What we have or hope to have in the Pits is something a bit like this, we like our room, each one of these people except for the Battery Master, has the ability to kick just about anyone out of the pits if it is needed, since working in the pits, much like NASCAR is all about speed.

1-Mechanical
1-Electrical
1-Programing
Haven't Seen this yet:
1-Battery Master

We also have backups, we call each of these guys in when, and if there is a problem, keep it small, and efficient

2-Mechanical Backups
1-Electrical Backup
1-Bonus Programmer if needed

that also doesn't count the Scouting/Strategy, or our Mentors/Engineers/Coaches but they won't be based out of the pits anyway.