Our team was looking into designing a better pit than what we have “our current pit consists of PVC and zip ties”. We noticed a lot of other teams used aluminum light staging for their pits, so my question to you guys is where would our team get this staging and roughly how much would it cost? Thanks in advance.
Ive seen trade show pits run in the thousands, but we are planning on building one out of 80/20 supplies. I would try designing one of those because you can really customize it for your needs, and it is much cheaper than one of those pre made ones.
We paid just under $4K for ours in 2012, including the red powder coating. It is incredibly easy to build and take apart, and we have had no problems with it. I don’t know that I’d recommend it necessarily, because of the up front expense, but it’s a fine investment.
If I were to start over today, I’d probably create a functional pit more like 973.
Agreed. There is value in being able to roll in, flip up a couple things, and start working. (Not to say you can’t do that with truss, but I know from tearing down the AndyMark Championship booth’s rear truss a couple times that it can be a lot of man-hours in a time you can ill afford them.)
Friarbots, team 3309, have the truss pit with lighting. Very impressive, and a group of four can set it up pretty quick. But they need to store all those 10’ sections of trussing and base plates 10 months out of the year.
Before you finalize plans on a desired pit layout, consider where all that stuff is going to be while you’re not at competitions.
And they also occasionally have to deal with the fact that some regionals have smaller than 10’ square pits!
Used 80/20 this year instead of a tent in 2016 and PVC years before. Personally, wasnt any better weight wise but was marginally easier to setup/take down. Ours was setup in a way that the vertical pieces were either 4 or 5ft per piece (truss?) and the top piece could fit inside the lower part, meaning you only had one, albeit about 2x the weight, part to carry per corner.
My team was looking to beef up the pit last year, but decided to keep the PVC. Although it does not look the best, it is rather inexpensive and we decided to spend the money we saved on other things. We keep two 50" (I think) monitors in the back to show videos in pictures. We also ran led strips across the PVC. These really boosted our pit appearance.
The first question we started off with when we designed out pit was: “what do we need to fit in here?” The answer to that was fairly simple: tools, robot, parts, binders, and a bunch more. Because of this we aimed for functionality and then stressed the aesthetic aspect.