This Fall, RoboJackets elected to do a major restructuring of the space in the RoboJackets shop. The major restructuring was switching the electrical room and the office to better utilize the space.
We asked Chris Bellflowers, the current shop manager, about the motivation for switching the two rooms. He said, “I first started thinking about the room swap when occupancy limits were placed on shop rooms due to COVID-19. Initially, the electrical room was only allowed to have one person in it, which isn’t enough people for teams to get anything done.” Even before the restrictions were in place, “it didn’t really make sense to have a whole room dedicated to CAD stations that aren’t used often enough to justify the space they take up, whereas the electrical room was used so frequently that it didn’t make sense to have it be so small.” Many mechanical members that CAD do so on their personal machines, so the desktop machines were used less frequently. This work has been a long time coming, as Chris mentioned that he proposed the room swap all the way back in May of this year.
Chris said that he was very pleased with the effort, and grateful for the people who showed up and put in the effort to swap the two rooms.
The team that volunteered to get the room swap done
The work isn’t totally complete, however: “We are waiting on some tools and organization from Milwaukee [originally from a large in-kind sponsorship] to complete the space. I would eventually like to paint the cabinets at the back of the room to give the room some more decoration as well as some backlighting for the cabinets.”
Finally, Chris opened a poll for new names for the new reorganized rooms. The names that RoboJackets came up with and voted for were the “Pixie Palace” for the new electrical room (named after unified pixie theory for electronics) and the “CAD Cave,” drawing on the room’s new purpose and size.
The office, post shop refresh in February 2021
The same space, now the “Pixie Palace”
The old electrical room, now the “CAD Cave”