Pit crews, how many students?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[mpf312]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I think it matters more on who the people are, not how many people there are. I believe last year we had pit schedules, where everyone took shifts in groups of four for a couple hours at a time.

---is that legal?

[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

[fire chaser 134]

Originally Posted by mpf312

this may seem obvious to some, yet what is the forula or steps taken to decide how many students are in your pit crew?

with my team usually the pit crew consisted of the people who really knew the robot plus one or two others who maintained the batteries.

[amateurrobotguy]

With our whole team, we only have 5 students and 2 adults(mentors). So, I guess we all can work in the pits. I am programming, 1 is power tools(Building, frame, etc.), 1 is strenght/Misc., 1 is electronics, and 1 is electronics/programming

[nicole839]

we usually have 2 public relationship, showing displays and answering questions

the strategist (moi)
the drivers and hp (who generally also do mechanical repairs)
maybe on other repair man or chick (RCU here)
one electrical
one programming
mentors go as they need to

actually since we're kieeping a body count on the pit (live ones anyways) i'm making pit passes, for prolonged pit time. otherwise things get crowded fast, and things get hectic.

[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....

[Bharat Nain]

Originally Posted by mpf312

---is that legal?

Yes, absolutely. That is legal. We do that every year. Since we cannot afford too many kids at the pits, we keep switching them around. This works well for small teams too if they need to rotate scouts etc.

[Babyhueyhnx]

we usually have about 3 or so students in our pit along with two mentors/engineers to fix and diagnose and do battery and the mentors/engineers usually end up watching. the other three scout. The rest of the team we try to keep in the stands to rate the bots on the field besides those scouting.