I’m excited that FIRST in Upper Midwest announced today grants to five organizations to create robotics hubs / practice facilities in Minnesota. This is the first step toward our goal of having a practice facility accessible to every team in Minnesota.
Grants were awarded to these organizations:
Becker, MN: Central Minnesota Robotics Hub (Alex Jurek, lead contact)
Byron, MN: Byron Public Schools/Byron Robotics (Aaron Nepstad, lead contact)
This (the Arrowhead Robotics Coalition) has been a huge labor of love for all of the people involved, I won’t name them, but I’ll let them out themselves if they want. We have a site in the Duluth Mall area that’s within a 5 minute drive of multiple hardware and electronics stores.
We’ve had 25 of the roughly 35 teams located within a 3 hour drive say they’ll use our center. We have a few tools (drill press, bench grinder, saws, hand tools, etc.) on site for minor tweaking. We hope to have more in the future.
But best of all, because of the generosity of our sponsors and the hundreds of hours of effort by about a dozen people, this is being provided free of cost to the local teams.
What if you live 4.5 hours away and 2 states over? Depending on the quality of the facility (and whether we manage a practice space for ourselves), we might be interested in coming over for a day. By “late winter 2020”, does that mean ~March or ~December 2020?
That means our doors should open Feb 1 2020. We will have carpet on that day and competition spec shield generator switches. (We’re building them out of welded 3"x3" aluminum tube, with weights added to make the weight and CG match the FIRST field versions.) We’re also building a competition spec loading station and control panel. The goal being that the behavior of the components on our field will match what teams see at competition.
The AndyMark field perimeters should arrive Mid February, @MrRoboSteve could say more on that timing.
We were already planning on reaching out to the team in Ironwood, but unless we’re full up (we have room for 7 or 8 teams) I see no reason we couldn’t make room for you. Our sponsors are primarily interested in supporting teams in NE Minnesota, but I am all about supporting FRC in its totality.
The plan is to get the other fields linked from the website as well (under the First in Upper Midwest menu, Competitive Robotics Hubs), but we haven’t gotten to that point yet.
This is fantastic!!! I really hope more states and districts take note and follow your example. Having easy access to practice fields for teams would be absolutely fantastic
We’d love to see you at the Week 3 Battalion Bootcamp in St. Michael MN! We’re still working out the kinks, but we’re hoping this will be the inaugural event for the Central Minnesota Robotics Hub’s perimeter.
It’s been a long road. There’s been a long history of advocacy with our state legislature (going back 10+ years!). In fact, we’re doing the annual STEM Advocacy Day at the State Capitol building in a few weeks.
The MURA field really got the ball rolling, getting some sponsorship to help supply a cheap wood border and field elements, as well as sponsorship from the Minneapolis Public Schools in terms of space in an unused school building (teams have to pay a nominal fee to cover janitorial costs). That acted essentially as a “proof of concept”, with teams using it the past 2 (I think) years. From there, once FUM got started and got non-profit status, we were able to utilize those legislature contacts, along with demonstrating the benefit of the MURA field, to get the state grant that’s making this effort possible.
Make contacts with your representatives, show them whats possible, let them know what you need to be successful… and then get them to fight for it on your behalf.
If that happens - and I should say we are in a rebuild year with 25% of the team being 8th graders - I will drive the team over personally!! Good luck at Great Northern. I’ve always had a couple of kids who say we should go there but the drive and the potential for, err, weather, have kept us away.
It’s the Grand Opening of the Arrowhead Robotics Center in Duluth tomorrow. We’ve been open and teams have been practicing, but something really cool showed up from Kokomo today that puts a real nice finishing touch on things. The control panels are being finished right now, the red loading station will be closer to field spec, but may not be up tomorrow. It’s been so much work but it’s so cool to have a full field with enough pit space that at least 6 teams can scrimmage together.
