Hey we are looking to redo our pit entirely and make a new collapsible frame. What does your team do and what is your setup? (pictures would be great)
that is a beautiful, beautiful pit
We start with a 10x10 popup canopy frame (ditch the roof) and attach foam panels using glued clips and tie wraps to decorate it as a castle, brick factory, or whatever weāre doing that year. The tool box, wooden storage chest and a bookshelf are on wheels so we can arrange things according to whether weāre on a corner or not. It lets us separate the functional side from the decoration side pretty well, and makes it easy to design something that can be rearranged as desired when we find out our pit assignment.
This is ours:
The rolling shelves are on the left, and we have a cover when we arenāt in the pit. On the right, some free space, and in the back is our battery charging station, along with our toolbox.
Im at work, so I donāt have any pictures, but we use 2 of these these 6ā x 2ā racks that we put totes filled with things that we need and tools. Then we run a workbench across them in the back where we have a cryobi drill press and a blade runner scroll saw. At Lowes we picked up a 4ā power strip to mount on the work bench, and a couple of those clamp on work site lamps which we fitted with LED bulbs to give our pit decent lighting.
We also moved away from a large tool box by standardizing our fasteners to 5 different types, and then bringing any must have quick repair tools. We have our robot cart centered in the pit with a lazy Susan and a scissors lift for ergonomic working. The cart has Plano flat tackle boxes that store the 5 fasteners we use and the tooling for those 5 fasteners
Also I recommend a vertical battery box. You can easily make one out of a 2 wheeled hand truck. It saves quite a bit of space.
These shelves are only 77" high thus there is 3 and a half feet of space left over that you can use for banner space, and hanging TVs. Its prime realestate for your marketing area.
One last thing that we have in our pit is a storage cart that our electronics team occupies. It has a divider in the center splitting the cart into an area for Stanley divider boxes, and then small shoe bin totes on the other side.
The shelving unit
https://www.lowes.com/pd/edsal-72-in-H-x-77-in-W-x-24-in-D-3-Tier-Steel-Freestanding-Shelving-Unit/3172913
The scroll saw
Here is the Steamworks version of our pit box.
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=156299&highlight=3959
The best setup Iāve used is 4901ās pit:
The black plastic shelving collapses down, and the small bins (which are the same ones we use in the shop) fit in kit totes for travel. Get a bunch of bins, and start categorizing your stuff. If you have too much stuff to fit in a bin, you sort out the bin into two more refined bins. (Big stuff is exempt, obviously.)
The back toolbox is particularly nice. The back banner stand detaches, and the black tabletop lifts off. The toolboxes then roll, so it all fits under a charter bus or in a trailer easily. Four people could transport all of it in one trip.
Also Looking for pit design ideas, we need help, keep the pics coming!
Our pit was pretty awesome.
Hereās a pic at the championship, and here it is all packed up.
Have another picture from champs.
Itās pretty cheap to make, being PVC. Some things are more expensive, such as the raspberry-pi powered monitors.
Most features can be seen in the photos, PM me with any questions you might have. Iāll do my best to answer, though Iām not the designer of our Pit.
We redesigned and built a completely new pit and have been quite happy with the results. Set up time is <30min and we managed to have lots of open space while maintaining a large amount worktop surface.
http://imgur.com/a/lvhXd
Id be happy to answer any questions about it.
I love your pit design, especially the built-in wiring. We keep getting dinged at competitions for running too many outlets and āsplitting power circuitsā. We have two high-density power strips (one on our workbench, the other on our battery cart). We always have to cycle between the two as to which one is plugged in to the one outlet in the pit. We want to build a fused sub-panel to feed both strips since the draw on either is rather minimal (laptop charger, battery charger, phone chargers etc.) but we were told this year by a safety inspector that this violates FIRST rules. Ever since then I have bee looking for that rule but cannot find anything. Are you aware of such a rule? I think what FIRST is trying to prevent is people from plugging power strips into more power strips.
I donāt want to say that FIRST has a systemic problem with safety advisers claiming things are āagainst the rulesā or ādangerousā without actual rules to back them up because they donāt fully understand the problem at hand*. I can certainly say that it has happened to me before, and undoubtedly will happen again. Of course this is not to say that you should not listen to the safety advisers (many of them are very knowledgeable people), but IMO if you know you understand the risks associated with what youāre doing, youāre confident that you have done everything to mitigate them, and the safety adviser canāt provide a rule or good reason not to do what you are planning, I would say itās okay to ignore their advice (while continuing to be as courteous as possible).
*Mainly because I donāt really have data to back that up and Iām sure Iāll get yelled at by someone. Itās been a problem at all of the competitions Iāve attended.
We had same problem at State Competition this year (regarding daisy-chaining). I submitted a detailed question into FIRST and have yet to receive any additional information. The Safety lead at States chose to interpret daisy chaining of power strips into the daisy chaining of any current tap device (which our team believes is an incorrect interpretation).
The 2017 Safety Manual defines it pretty well in section 3.4:
DO NOT ādaisy chainā ā plug a power strip into another power strip.
Avoid the following electrical power supply setups to prevent overloading:
ā¢ Extension cord plugged into another extension cord.
ā¢ Extension cord plugged into a power strip.
ā¢ Multi-device receptacle plugged into a power strip or extension cord.
The way I read that is that itās only against the rules to have power strips connected to power strips.
Weāve definitely had problems with safety advisers getting mad about our power strips in the past. We switched to a big power strip, with a breaker, along the back of our pit cart. We changed the pit layout a bit to minimize the number of separate power strips we need. Most of our battery chargers and tools plug into the main cart, and a few extension cords branch off.
Weāre working on a pit redesign, but what we have now works pretty well. We end up having 5 separate rolling items, so load-in and setup is doable with 5 people. The pop-up sides and banners go up quickly and let us adjust for different pit sizes. We can also hang lights and blue banners from the middle-height poles. The big cart in the back belongs to Mechanical and has a huge built in power strip. In this picture it also has a rug that would normally go down on the floor in the middle, which is nicer to stand on and also allows us to test the robot on the floor. The little red cart is for Electrical/Pneumatics, plus the driver station lives on top of it. We sometimes put a tote under a sponsor banner to hold robot mechanisms to demonstrate, giveaways, and some outreach material.
We still havenāt decided on or designed improvements yet, but weāre talking about adding more racks on the shelf to add more parts cases there instead of in the big cartās middle cabinet, rearranging so the layout is shaped like an L instead of a U to give us more space to move around, and a better stand for outreach material.
Adding overhead lighting is a priority for next years pit. It makes the pits sparkle and easier to work in. We have a PVC pit with spot around the top for banners for several years. There are definitely better looking pits, but it is pretty easy setup/teardown. Our toolbox/battery/spare part cart fills the back and is motorized for loading. We have a couple shelving units to hold drivers station and miscellany. We use a tablecloth on the provided table and hide extra totes there and have our scrapbook and pins on the front of the table.
Best I could come up with at the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTUYDSyNm8A
I really liked the aesthetics of ROBOTZ Garageās pit: https://twitter.com/FRCTeam4451/status/837439603531526144
Our current pit is just about the worst pit you could imagine (little storage, so things get thrown on the floor, the branding is old and we have no place to store it, just general very disorganized) so Iām very interested to see where this ends up. One of the things Iāve thought of is adding foam tiles to the floor of the pit to make it easier to stand for long periods of time as well as make the pit look nicer. The ones I linked to are also ANSI rated and the like, so I doubt safety would be an issue. Has anyone actually put these in a pit, and how do you like them?
We do tiles in the AndyMark booth at Championship, except theyāre the standard tiles used in FTC (imagine that) in AndyMark blue. You do start to feel that difference after four days on your feet, though our shelving does leave quite the divot. You may not want to tile every last square inch.
(Personally, I lust after whatever plushiness National Instruments is doing underneath their boothā¦but I bet ours packs smaller.)
Edit to add:
YASSSSSSS. 4451 (and now 6366 as well) are the gold standards of pits for me. Having to fit everything into about 24" of depth behind the curtain or on the cart is a wonderful way to make you think about what needs to come. And the branding is 99.9th percentile among teams. (I may be a little biased here, given that (x.com).)
We tried foam flooring and hated it. It wears easy and is hard to clean.
We now use hard pvc garage floor tiles and love them.
Here is a picture of our pit - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5VlGPBVodj3Qi15M0xUZXJBbHFqV1FWOFZYNW9Dem1sQk00/view?usp=sharing
Inside we have a 4ft long wire shelf and 2 tool carts.
Having been on a team with them and one without, standing on them is super nice, especially towards the end of competition. Whatās not nice is having to clean aluminum off of them. I imagine that as Sperkowsky said they would have worn if we used them longer.