Hi FIRST community, I was simply wondering where your team spends the six weeks of build season.
I wanna see some statistics about this matter to see the most popular build spaces. Thanks.
I selected “School Space”, but 2175 actually shares a school space that belongs to another local team, 3130. We helped get this team started last year and they were kind enough to allow us to share their shop space.
A virtual tour of the shop shared by 2175 and 3130 can be found here:
http://robotics.mnmsa.org/media_photosynths.php
The shop itself is used during the day by the school, but the teams have permanent storage space in some of the closets off the shop and in the space upstairs.
We use 3 classrooms at our school. 1 is the build room. All of our tools and building materials in it. 2 is the Programing Room. It has computers, and electronics. 3 is one of the computer labs that is actually used during the school day so that is were most of our marketing team does their work and where our team meets at the beginning of each meeting to talk about what we are doing.
We have 17,000 sq feet. There is a main room 45x20 with four 12x12 offices off it and a 20x20 break room. There is a full height (24’) warehouse space for VEX and FRC builds. Some pictures are here Team 1640 open house and more to come.
For 2011 we are one of the haves. I hope we don’t squander it. Downingtown Area School District ROCKS!!!
Over the past 3 years we’ve been bounced around quite a bit. Originally, we used an old, unused auto shop storage room in our 9th grade campus. After the first year, we were moved into a band/choir uniform storage space, which was then turned into a classroom last year… so we moved again into an usused art dark room (there are a lot of unused rooms, levies ran out and thus budget cuts = class cuts). We renovated it and probably will keep it from now on, as it’s conveniently right next to the tech shop of our coach and to the CAD computer lab.
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.
We build in the school’s metal shop, but have to have everything put away every day… Into a tiny little storage closet without much room for anything at all! (In the 1950s, it was a shower. In the 1990s, it was a storage/dressing room for the school plays).
All in all, we have it better than some and worse than others.
Exploding Bacon has built in:
A mentors garage/another mentors living room-2006 & 2007/team became to big
A Sheriffs horse barn-2008/Now torn down
Another mentors bigger garage-2009/drove mentor crazy, decided to move out to save his sanity
An abandoned 10,000 square foot pill manufacturing building-2010/Now torn down
Tentatively building on one of our sponsors properties-2011
We have a lot of experience moving our equipment 
We have some space donated to us by our major sponsor, Chrysler.
We work at the Chrysler Tech Center in Auburn Hills, which happens to be one of the largest buildings in the world (it has its own freeway exit). We have a tiny bit of space in the south wing (where most of the labs are).
Our primary shop used to to be a little notch out of the road (a road runs through the first floor of the building), which used to hold electric forklifts for charging. Many years ago, they decided they didn’t want to hold electric forklifts there anymore, so we had a wall put in and now we have a shop. What is nice is that we have a lot of power for tools, shop air, and can do stuff in the hallway (road) as long as we watch for cars. It isn’t very big, but it is ours and we can keep anything we want in there. We also have a large assortment of manual machines, most of which were being discarded by labs, including a large manual mill, lathe, and many bandsaws and drill presses. We can also access many tools in other areas of the building (4’ jump shear, more lathes and mills, welding equipment, and CNC machines), if we arrange ahead of time. We call this room “The Botcave”.
Our other room, the CAD room, is a room that used to contain a lot of vending machines. It now contains 7 workstations, a server, all of the PR stuff, and a table for making antennae.
We also have access to a basement under the NVH (noise vibration harshness) lab across the hall from the botcave, where we store old robots and build our practice field. We have a full field of carpet, but no border around it.
We can also use a conference room, but it is not ours so we clean it at the end of every day. We begin and end our meetings here, eat here, and use the GIANT floor-ceiling whiteboards here.
This is essentially exactly what Shaker’s build space is, though we have a multipurpose room and a metal / wood shop. It’s rather annoying to not be able to leave a single thing out and losing stuff into the void that is Shaker’s closet. We never have trouble storing parts in the pits at competitions because it’s more room than we have for our stuff!
It takes about 20 minutes to take everything out and 20 minutes to put it back… leaves us at about an hour and a half to actually do anything!
However, we’ve got a nice shop full of neat manual tools, including a x-y mill, a few lathes and drill presses, and a horizontal bandsaw.
I know exactly how you feel…
20 minutes?!? I start harassing students to start cleaning up an hour before ‘close time’… And even then we end up with far too much stuff in “homeless hardware” instead of put back proper the way it should be!
We get to work in our school’s two tech rooms (both equipped with a full set of computers and tools), as well as the graphic tech room for making buttons. Thankfully the teachers that use those rooms are our staff advisors, so we get a little bit of freedom in how we leave things (since I have the first class of the day in there I sometimes leave the programming laptops out to do their thing overnight)
I can honestly say team 103 is completely blessed with our build space:
-
An art room that seconds as a computer lab
Our main mentor is an art teacher, and this room is where we eat every night also. Its a good sized room with many tables and a small computer lab station on the far side. -
An Animation, “back room”
This room was actually designed as a art storage closet for the art room, but we put some computers back there (Along with all of the snacks) and it becomes the animation room. It is about 20’ x12’, so not big at all, but extremely useful! This size is including all of the space the cabinets lining 2 of the 4 walls in the room. -
A full computer lab
This lab has about 25 of the most powerful computers in the school, and is a good sized room. It is adjacent to the shop, and where our inventor crew work, and where our mechanical team designs. -
A full sized shop
The shop is about 25’ x 40’ which includes 2 mills, 2 lathes, a cnc router table, 4 band saws, and various other tools. Connected to this is a small room with a lot of cabinets for storage. -
A 40’ x 60’, “Barn.”
In here we create a full-sized field every year. We have huge cabinets along one of the long walls, holding all of our past years and current years equipment along with all of our fundraiser items. On the far wall, we usually have a collage of 18 years of team stuff. It was actually built for us about 6 years ago because we had to use one of the schools gyms (which, coincidentally, the football team “needed”). So the school built our team this barn, and it has served us EXTREMELY WELL!!!
Any questions pm me.
Keep in mind this is the preseason where we only have one mechanism to work on (“practice” drive base). During build, it’s just a massive time sink.
We don’t really have ROOM to be organized, it’s rather annoying!
Apparently my programming mentors started a hackerspace around here… I guess I can go there too. But our tech shop at school is the main place
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.