Pit crews, how many students?

[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