Build Space

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

Where we build now is property of the Rochester City School District but it is not on school grounds. It is located in a public building that the City School District uses for special programs. We share the space with two rookie teams.

This is our previous home for a few years before we had to move to ur newest home.
At the far left next to the claw of our 2005 robot is other teams trophies on display in our team Museum the leads to the entrance to our kitchen. Past the kitchen area after you walk past our trophy case of official awards won at FIRST events and under our two National Chairman's banners and our 2008 FLR banner to the left (not pictured would be our PAW room where the website, animation and Promotions including designing our Hall of Fame booth). A little further to the right would be where Drives and Electrical team and the Mechanical team reside in their respective areas (also not pictured). Where all those chairs are is where the main meeting area resides and behind that is where our practice field is right nest to it. Further up towards the back is where our shop resides and our dock door is as well as the back entrance to the shop. Our 2006 robot is on display on a rotating table designed for demos. Behind the robot is our Software team's area. Then you can see the front entrance to the site and finally at the far right of the picture is our 1996 robot. We had all of our robots on display at the site(in various states of functionality) except for our 1992 robot which is in the possession of FIRST and on display at FIRST place.
Since we have moved we sadly had to dispose of some of our robots.

[Andrew Schreiber]

3450 will be building out of a pair of rooms at our school. They are exclusively ours. We have 2 lofted storage spaces, a small shop room (ironically our mill and lathe are NOT in it) and a "class room" without any desks. We also have a small office and a closet in the hallway between the rooms.

As for tools: Mill, Lathe (both older than any of our mentors but well maintained and in great condition) 3 drill presses, 1 2-ton arbor press, a vertical and horizontal band saw, and a wide variety of hand tools.

My only problem with our shop is that our heating is a little funky. We got the rooms from the school because they weren't in use. Don't know why but the heater doesn't seem to work. It stays above freezing but the average temps are close to 50. If we can't fix it over the winter break we will be investing in some space heaters. (IMHO, a safety related expense)

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

As for tools: Mill, Lathe (both older than any of our mentors but well maintained and in great condition) 3 drill presses, 1 2-ton arbor press, a vertical and horizontal band saw, and a wide variety of hand tools.

There is a horizontal mill in RPI's shop that helped win WWI! Machine tools are truly timeless...

On 1276 our initial shop space looked like this. It was a storage mezzanine until we came along in 2004. In 2005 we annexed the room under it, which gave us a 10x20 or so permanent storage space that we could keep our tools, parts and other stuff, in addition to being a "clean room" for electronics. We were also allowed to use some of the shop classes space as long as we cleaned up after ourselves, which meant that any given meeting there could be 3 or 4 or more subgroups working totally independently of each other.

It would be awesome to have 78's warehouse.

[TD78]

Originally Posted by iCurtis

It would be awesome to have78's warehouse.

We are truly blessed to have such a big workspace that we can call ours. The Navy has been very supportive of the team and it's ongoing successes (in less than two years we have gone from 1 FTC team and no FLL teams to now having 2 FTC teams and 7 FLL teams).

The workspace in that old American Robot episode has undergone a dramatic transformation. While this is a more accurate representation of current changes, it is even more different now that we have spent the last several months reorganizing the "cage" workspace to incorporate some old machine tools (a benchtop lathe, mill/drill, and standing drill press) I saved from being tossed by the Navy. There is also a small office out of the picture that we have 5 donated desktops networked together...hoping we can do some decent CAD work this year!

We lack a lot of the wicked fancy machines some other teams have access to, but try to make up for it working within our capabilities and strategy! Anyone in the Newport, RI area is welcome to visit!

[sgreco]

2079 works out of a facility that we rent. I didn't enter anything in the poll since I'm not exactly sure what it would be classified as. In total it's approximately a 4,000 square feet facility. 80% of that is an industrial floor space, and the rest is two office rooms. It works out very well for us. We put code and CAD work the offices, and on the floor space we build. The space is pretty much ideal for a FIRST team. We aren't restricted by school hours or anything. Basically if a mentor is present we can get in. The only problem is it's a little pricey.

[Brandon_L]

We've got our schools wood shop as our main build area, and thats all we really use. Its got wood cutting tools great for prototyping but all the metal work we do is done by hand, other then the giant metal cutting chop saw we have.

Other rooms we CAN use but don't:

Tech Lab, its got about 15 computers from 1990 that can't do much, and the same tools from the wood shop, jammed into half the space.

CAD Lab, We use for testing the robot on carpet when we need to, and on the rare occasion that we have a CAD team, they go there.

We used to have our old abandoned metal shop, but for no apparent reason they decided to move they weight room into it (???) and now we have a tiny area of it for storage.

[216Robochick288]

The Grandville RoboDawG teams are very blessed with our build spaces!

In the years before my freshman year, we [288] were in the "Dungeon" of the 6th grade building, with multiple rooms to set stuff up in, build, program, ect., and it was located right next to the tech department. Not too bad of a build area!

Freshman year we needed a new spot, so we moved to a local strip mall where no one had been in ages. we bought 2 slots and were able to have our 2nd team, as well as an almost-full-sized field and a place to eat [apparently metal shrapnels aren't good for your health... Who would have known!]

For the past 2 years, we were able to get the old cafeteria in the old 6th grade building [I say old because it was retired and the 6th graders were moved to elementary schools]. We share the space with the special needs kids who go to school there. Our only major rule was we had to keep the area they had lunch in clean. This will be our 3rd year at this location and now have 3 teams, a full sized field, Lego League storage, our own "cutting/milling" room, Botball storage, and eating area! Its a huge space and we thank Grandville's Admin for allowing us to work there, and we hope to have many more memory filled years there!

[Dustin Shadbolt]

We use a metal shop that one of our mentors own. He has built a room for the programmers and all the computers to be used. We have ample space for our small team .

[pfreivald]

Just seeing phrases such as "the 6th grade building" makes me laugh. We have less than 900 students K-12 in our district...

[Cyberphil]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

Just seeing phrases such as "the 6th grade building" makes me laugh. We have less than 900 students K-12 in our district...

Wow! I thought our district was small! We have about 750 students in the High School (grades 9-12) and somewhere around 2200 in the district. How many kids are on your team? I have heard from other teams about how rare it is to get 30 kids in our school size on a team, so I could not imagine having that small of a school!

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Cyberphil

Wow! I thought our district was small! We have about 750 students in the High School (grades 9-12) and somewhere around 2200 in the district. How many kids are on your team? I have heard from other teams about how rare it is to get 30 kids in our school size on a team, so I could not imagine having that small of a school!

1551 probably should be part of your rural network or at least should be involved.
They are an upcoming program. President Paul Gudonis told the volunteer crew their story during the Volunteer meeting in Atlanta last year.

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

1551 probably should be part of your rural network or at least should be involved.
They are an upcoming program. President Paul Gudonis told the volunteer crew their story during the Volunteer meeting in Atlanta last year.

He did? News to me -- that's really cool!

...that said, to answer the question, we have between 25-30 students on the team every year -- more than any other extracurricular activity -- but many of those students are shared. (That is to say, if they bowl, or play basketball, or swim, or are in jazz band, etc., they share their time between extracurricular activities.) We generally have between fifteen and twenty students that do *only* FIRST during the build season, and even those we generally have to share at other times of the year.

It's part and parcel to living in the middle of nowhere!

[Cyberphil]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

1551 probably should be part of your rural network or at least should be involved.
They are an upcoming program. President Paul Gudonis told the volunteer crew their story during the Volunteer meeting in Atlanta last year.

Sadly, we have not touched the FIRST Interactive Rural Support network. I asked one of our mentors about a year ago and the only response I received was that, "It was too much work." Although I did not like the outcome of the great program, there was nothing I could do. I have talked to some Alumni about it, but not too much was said. I only stumbled upon it about 2 years ago. I thought it was a really great program, and I wondered why I had never heard of it. Now I see it on the helpful links area on CD. You can see how dated it is by the team structure page.

He did? News to me -- that's really cool!

...that said, to answer the question, we have between 25-30 students on the team every year -- more than any other extracurricular activity -- but many of those students are shared. (That is to say, if they bowl, or play basketball, or swim, or are in jazz band, etc., they share their time between extracurricular activities.) We generally have between fifteen and twenty students that do *only* FIRST during the build season, and even those we generally have to share at other times of the year.

It's part and parcel to living in the middle of nowhere!

That is very impressive! I think that the reason for our team having the number it does in this size school is because of our requirements. Students are not allowed to be in basketball, football, the winter musical, or any other winter extracurricular activity for that matter. It is a requirement for team members to dedicate all of their time (minus school, sleep, and doctors appointments) to the robotics team. Although it is tough, I believe that this is what gives our team a little advantage over the other teams. Our students are dedicated to the team, and no exceptions are made.

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Cyberphil

Although it is tough, I believe that this is what gives our team a little advantage over the other teams.

Interesting. I feel exactly the opposite is true in our case.

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It makes me think that most people don't understand what "rural" means. They don't understand that the closest business that employs more than ten full-time people is forty miles away. They don't understand that a run to Home Depot or Lowes is a 45-mile round-trip. They don't get that finding students willing to dedicate their winter only to FIRST is, by and large, a pipe dream...

It is for this reason that I founded my non-profit to promote FIRST through the rural Southern Tier and Finger Lakes region. In spite of all the challenges, there is no reason why every rural school should not have a FIRST team.

[Cyberphil]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

Interesting. I feel exactly the opposite is true in our case.

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It makes me think that most people don't understand what "rural" means. They don't understand that the closest business that employs more than ten full-time people is forty miles away. They don't understand that a run to Home Depot or Lowes is a 45-mile round-trip. They don't get that finding students willing to dedicate their winter only to FIRST is, by and large, a pipe dream...

It is for this reason that I founded my non-profit to promote FIRST through the rural Southern Tier and Finger Lakes region. In spite of all the challenges, there is no reason why every rural school should not have a FIRST team.

Are you sure we are not on the same team? This sounds very much like us! And I respect your view on the topic very much.