So our team is a school team, and we are meeting in a classroom. The classroom has a bunch of tables and chairs, and we don’t have enough time to put them away and set them back up. We could possibly? do it in the hallway. How long does it take to set up and take apart a field? Any suggestions on how we could do this?
Edit: Thanks for the suggestions, I realized I need to clarify. Our meeting time is about 90 minutes, so we do not have the time to take apart and set up a field. As for the field, itself, our district has several, but if we get one, then we have to leave it up 24/7 in order to allow open practice from teams in our district, which we cannot do.
We keep the outer perimeter assembled for the most part, but split into the four corners. This allows us to store the corners when they’re not being used, and we can put that together in ten minutes or so. After that, it’s just laying down field tiles and putting towers in place. Not counting cubes, I’d estimate twenty or so minutes to put together a field. I could be off, depending on how many people are putting it together, so keep that in mind.
The hallway is definitely a viable option, my team did that last year. You could also propose that half of the room should be dedicated towards robotics, depending on how much space you have.
try only going for half a field, or the part you wanna design your auton in, so you can atleast test that. however, if you dont really even want an auton it is possible to just practice on the regular classroom floor with cubes and just one tower to score in.
We had that exact issue due to a lack of space… so we basically put our field in a common area right next to our engineering classroom. We left the field assembled but covered it with Tarp… make sure you receive permission from Admin, SRO’s and Security for monitoring the area if you have security cameras in your building.
Here are some pics from our school, we have a projector in that common area and we use it for TM when we run matches
We actually just added those signs this year when we set up the field. We chose to keep the field outside our room because our building is only like 3 years old and was build on an extremely open plan, with projectors, outlets, USB and HDMI connectivity built Into the walls so we realized that we could leave TM set up there the whole time and it looks kinda cool.
We have to set up our field in the hall as well. To make it easier and quicker I replaced the bolts and wing nuts on the corner brackets with clevis pins, hitch pins and a nylon spacer. Just slide in the clevis, and secure it in place with the hitch pin. I leave the wall gussets between the side panels intact, one on the top of a panel and one on the bottom of the adjacent panel and just slide them together.
make them collect money for a new tile set at the end of the season In New England, we get a lot of nasty road salt trekked into the shop - so keeping shoes off the tiles prolongs the life of the tile.
Interesting, keep the vertical alignment - with the top corner bracket it should keep the top together well, but the bottom there will be space as you need some space to release the pin.
My team splits the field into three different strips, each being 6x2 tiles, and stacks them up. We also keep the field wall on each strip. (except for the ones on the end of the middle strip, we just set those on the top slice. If you could leave them out in a classroom in this form, all you would have to do is drag the sections out, screw on the center walls, and stick the towers back in the bases. You could probably leave the bases screwed to the tiles. Hope you find a solution that works!
In New England, we get a lot of nasty road salt trekked into the shop - so keeping shoes off the tiles prolongs the life of the tile.