Hello,
While we didn’t go OA this past year and do a build blog, I figured it might be interesting to do a summer blog of what we are (and are not) getting done. One of my personal goals for the summer is to do accomplish a few of the items below for shop organization that has been on the to-do list for like…4 years now. It will hopefully soon be an official team goal for the summer/fall too.
Some background on our shop
We haven’t had a summer and fall in our robotics room in…awhile. Our workshop space was renovated in the summer/fall of 2018. Which was awesome, but meant that we weren’t working in it. No big deal, we worked out some storage space and pulled things into the cafeteria or gym to work that summer/fall. Not being able to move things back into the shop until the week before kickoff 2019 made things tough and disorganized, but the improved workspace area was definitely worth the mess.
Summer of 2019 we had to move out of the shop for fire suppression stuff. We did get to sort of move in and do some training in the fall of 2019. But not as successfully as I would have liked
Then of course the pandemic mostly kept us out of our room in 2020 and 2021. In the fall of 2021, we did start coming back in with about 10 students at a time for any given hour, and some students did help out significantly with organizing the room much better. The best it’s ever been in fact. It was largely useable this year
Why is this on Chief?
I want to share a little bit about our plan for improvements, partially to hold us accountable, partially to document it for others, and partially to get input from others.
What’s the plan? What are you doing?
There are a number of things I’d like to do. There’s many “first world problems” in that we are very fortunate to have the amount of space we have and so some of these things may be helpful for some, and some things may just make people not feel sorry for us at all. I’m going to outline a few tasks in what I anticipate will be the order that I tackle them and with my current plant for how we handle it. Feel free to chime in with your opinion on if I’m misprioritizing or ideas on how to tackle the problem better.
The driving factor behind all of this is that our team will probably need to accommodate anywhere between 60-100 students. In 2022, we built 2 “pearadox” robots and 2 “Everybots”. I don’t know if we’ll continue to build 4 robots every year, but I anticipate we’ll build at least 3 (Comp bot, practice bot, and Everybot). We may at some point end up with a 2nd team like Spectrum/Photon, I think it’s unlikely that we go the 1912/1914 route, and I don’t intend for us to split into two separate/distinct teams like 118/324. I’d like to make efficient use of our space to handle a large amount of students of varying skills, and make it easy for students to not only find but also put away parts and materials without necessarily having to ask specific people where it goes.
Below is just my take on tasks in roughly the priority I would place it. It is very possible that after a team meeting we may prioritize. For instance, we may determine one task is so simple to do that we do it before a higher priority task.
Task 1 - parts sorting and storage
On recommendation from Allison // 3538 - I bought some sterilite containers to try out. Before we had used some of those commonly seen bins from Harbor Freight or Home Depot. They’re nice, and still used for some things - but I have become a sterilite fan for sure. They’re almost a perfect size for our shelves, and I can do 4 stacks of 2 on them. Stacking 2 I find to be acceptable, stacking more than 2 strongly discourages people from utilizing bins on the bottom or middle. They’re also small enough that for most items you store in them, they won’t get too heavy to be cumbersome or stress the structural integrity of the bin.
We have 5 shelving units with 4 shelves on each shelf. There are some other shelving units besides them that will end up being lumped in with this organization effort that are slightly different. With 8 bins on each shelf, that provides space for 160 sterilite bins. I bought this 144 pack from walmart that’s a little bit more than $5/bin. I want to group like bins together, and label shelving units with letters and shelfs with numbers. So a group of 8 bins will all be labeled with one bin and one number (ie “A1”). Where the bin is within that group of 8 shouldn’t matter too much, and if it moves around a little it’s not too hard to look at the 8 spots where it’s supposed to be.
There are some bins that I’m going to take some liberties with what goes in and how we label them. For instance - we primarily use M5 bolts with the ultraplanetary gearboxes, so that bin may have some smaller boxes of M5 bolts with it. There is some risk that this ends up being too non-intuitive to new students and will need re-evaluation, but I think that this is better than a student not knowing what bolts to use and trying a bunch of other bolts and forcing the wrong thing. Similarly, we only use the jst extention boards with spark maxes, so we may put spare cables and joiner boards in the spark max bin.
Here are some thoughts from this past fall for some potential bin organization. I am going to re-look at this in the coming weeks and change some things about it: Shop organization - Google Sheets
Also, to help visualize, a shelving unit will be labeled A, B, C…H and have shelves 1…5. So there will be 8 bins within A1, 8 bins with in A2, etc like the following crudely done image
Task 2: raw material improvement
Fall of 2021 we built a pretty simple holder for raw materials. It was pretty decent, but not great. I’m not sure if it’s that we just have too much, we don’t manage putting this away well enough, or what - but I think we miss utilizing scrap pieces first and don’t know what we have. You can see pictures of the set up, and the intended utilization here. It’s primarily material that we put on the CNC router (which we have a 4x4 bed, but have also done some things that limit it’s usable area to a little bit smaller than 4x4).
What I’d like to do is just accept that we’ll cut almost everything down to 4x4, or perhaps even 4x2 and store in in a set up more similar to this: https://www.grainger.com/product/GRAINGER-APPROVED-Horizontal-Sheet-Storage-Rack-1BBY4
We also need to figure out better ways to store and manage our tube/flat bars. I am open to suggestions on that - right now we a rack that we store most of our rectanglur tube and flat bars; we store solids on the bottom, ⅛” on the 2nd (from the bottom) shelf, 1/16” on third shelf, and wood on the top. We have an A-frame shelf that we store axles/shafts/PVC on. That might be mostly OK as is and just needs some TLC in reorganizing and getting rid of things we don’t need. The picture shown is after some clean up/before build season.
Task 3: New work tables
We build these tables primarily in our rookie year. I will need to get some better pictures of these tables - but you can see our 4x8 and 4x4 picture here. They have served us well, but they’re sort of an awkward size. Additionally, I’d like to have it set up a little bit better for storage of materials underneath it. We may want to keep one or two larger tables for working on a whole robot, but I think I’d generally rather move towards more slightly smaller work tables. I’m not sure how small is too small. Really it’s just the depth that I think is the issue, if it were 8f by 3ft (something closer to the max robot width), I think it’d be better.
This is a lower priority - but I am also wide open to suggestions on this. I conceptually like these tables from Home Depot or something similar.
Task 4: Super Pit
The kids really want to build one (and I do too but $$). I am including it here just because it would also arguably help our organization. We currently sort of have 2 “pits” set up. Our normal competition pit, and then another “working pit” that we encourage students to pull tools from first. This is currently in the middle of some of our work tables.
- Close up of our “working pit”
- Relative location of our “working pit”
- I don’t currently have a good picture representing our “comeptition pit” set up, but it’s in this area (it’s just missing a lot)
Our “working pit” is where we’ll keep fasteners. I need to spend some time thinking about how we store them, it’s currently a mess. 118 had some really nice milwaukee cases I think for their bolts, and I may be copying a similar set up. It’d be really nice to replace some of these shelving units with some lista cabinets, but $$$$
Task 5: What to do with old robots
I’d like to build storage along the wall that we can set our robots on. We’ve been scolded before about a fire escape exit - so I don’t want to necessarily build these if they’ll get extra scrutiny. But we’ll need to start thinking about what we do with robots as we’re running out of room. Also a low priority…for now.
Task 6: CAD/strategy area
We have some built in tables in this area. I think there’s some things we can do to make better use of this year. This is an area where some students can set up laptops, and we have a computer or two permanently here for running prusa slicer for our 3d printer wire rack that’s nearby.
Task 7 - field set up
Add extension cables and chargers at each driver station. Right now we usually run an extension cable to a driver station whenever we want to test from it. I’m thinking I might just get some outlets more permanently set up
Rounding out the post with pictures of our space
I apparently don’t currently have pictures of our chairmans room. I try not to interfere with them. It’s also where we host our Brilliant Black Builders and Gearbox Girls meetings after meetings.
You can find a full album of pictures here.
I also recently put together this PDF for something else, so figured I’d include it here too. It has some captions for various pictures. ShopDoc.pdf (12.0 MB)
Swerve
unrelated to room organization - another summer task will be getting comfortable with swerve drive. We had most of a robot built for the at home challenge last year. A couple of our former sophomores/rising juniors took home some stuff, disassembled, reassembled, and programmed our thrifty swerve bot. Next we’ll need to learn some about re-treading and path following. If we decide to move the 2022 CAD over to a swerve base, I’ll share an onshape link as we go through that. Really impressed with what they’ve gotten done from home: https://photos.app.goo.gl/FvMYmLdyotC9s2tF7 code here: GitHub - HJTDM/SwerveDriveTest. I need to spend some time reviewing the code - I haven’t looked at it at all.
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