Mac DriverStation?
 

I was wondering if there is a 2012 driver station for mac, i thought i saw some teams using one at competition and was curious, thanks!

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Teams are runnin the DS on a Windows operating system on a Mac machine using Boot Camp.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

I'm pro-Mac, but I'm just wondering: Why? I know the DS is important, but you definitely don't need a Mac to run it (The classmate works, and PCs are cheaper.)

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

They Should open source the DS so that all the OSes can run it.

@SuperNerd256: If you want something more powerful than the classmate, but the only other comp you have is a Mac, then what? The same goes for us with Linux.

@androb4 I wonder if I can do the same through VirtualBox on Linux. *Goes to Testing Bench*

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Lol, yea it should work. You just have to configure the usb and ethernet ports

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

The driver station is open source, it just requires LabView, which is not.
On Ubuntu, I have gotten the driver station to work in WINE(which I also know works on a mac through macports).
winetricks is broken at the moment, but as soon as it works I'll post my WINE configuration.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Ok, WINE is being very problematic, I'll see if I can remember:

you will need vcrun6, all the richeds, richtx, maybe vbrun, probably dotnet30 (you will need dotnet40 and vc2010(2011?) to use the kinect, good luck with THAT), possibly some directx stuff, do NOT install msi2, and maybe wsh stuff.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

This is my exact wine configuration:

comdlg32ocx, vcrun2003(I should try updating, now that I have a newer wine version), allfonts, and windows version set to 7.

Huh, I thought there was more.

Come to think of it, the kinect stuff might work now that I am using wine 1.5

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Just because?

103 uses an 11 inch MacBook Air. The classmates are...uh...less than desirable, at least in my opinion.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

I suppose that if you were looking to buy a laptop with the sole purpose of being your DS, an Air would get on your list for the hardware (unibody construction, long-lasting battery, MagSafe cord to prevent trips to boost your Safety Award cred). Not saying it'd be everybody's choice.

(We used our programming mentor's daily-driver 15" (or was it 17"?) HP laptop as our driver station this year. Considering that it was in about eight pieces at one point at Championship, I'm not sure he'd let us repeat that.)

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Where is the source? I want it! One idea of mine for an off-season project was to reverse engineer it and make a Linux version, but if it's open source, I don't need to reverse engineer the protocol from tcp dumps haha

I'm fairly sure the LabView source for the Driver Station isn't public, nor is the DS-FMS protocol or the DS-cRIO protocol. The dashboard source however, is public. If you want to work with someone on making a linux (and mac for that matter) version of the Driver Station I'd be happy to help (remember, it can't be used at competition).
- Oliver

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Alexa is right we use a Macbook Air running bootcamp. We do all of our programing with it and use it for the driver station. One of the main reasons I chose the MBair is it runs all day ona single charge. Wirh the cassmate I could just make it thru a single round with the wait time to get on the field.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Why would you want to? With all the connectivity issues already out there, you are adding one more complication. One place that the already heavily loaded FTA people cannot help you trouble shoot. When they say sorry the problem is in your unsupported operation system what are you going to do?

Funny to hear an Apple person talk about open source. :yikes: :)

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

We are running Windows 7 Pro only the hardware is different.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Why would it add another complication??
The MB will BOOT Windows OS normally. Just like on the classmate

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

I have to say that I appreciate how cross-platform most of the WPI tools are. We can develop and deploy code from any student's laptop. The smart dashboard runs on anything. Once the robot is enabled, the console is visible no matter what OS is hosting Netbeans. Vanilla FTP gets us into the cRIO. We can visit the Axis camera from any browser.

This pattern breaks when we need to enable and drive the robot. Since the driver station is just talking UDP, you'd think we could drive from any computer.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

our team has a mac book with straight up windows 7 no boot camp no mac os it runs the driverstation nicely

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Oh I know that it can't be used at the competition haha. I just got really tired of either finding the classmate or rebooting into Windows to drive the robot when I did all of my development in Linux. I'll be sure to send you a message when I start working on it in the summer (although I might be swamped with trying to program the swerve drive that we are designing).

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

The classmate was also older and slower and just...blech.

I get really excited when I get to use that Air. I'm just a big Apple fan. :rolleyes:

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Sounds good, I'll try to remember to message you part way through the summer if I don't hear anything. Some reverse engineering of the FMS to DS protocol has been done (I think) and possibly some DS to Robot. I'll have to do some googling to find it again though.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

We used a macbook pro ONLY becuase of the great battery life (im a pc person)

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Yep, my mistake, the dashboard is, but the driverstation isn't.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

And the DS/FMS-CRIO protocol is "sort of" open source, because wpilib is open source, and one can find how the protocol works in there.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

We programmed on a ThinkPad with some pretty good hardware throughout the entire season. The Classmate was just too slow to handle much of anything.

Upon arriving at the WPI Regional, the ThinkPad's HDD bit the dust. We set up my personal Mac to run the DS and LabVIEW via Parallels Win7. Once we reconfigured the networks and USB connections,all was well.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

Members in our team were able to get DS on to our Macs pretty easily through bootcamp and windows 7. It's way more expensive, but reliable that way.
It ran faster on windows 7 premium than it did on ultimate because there was more space to run the program in.
However, we relied on an Asus that was given to our team since it was devoted specifically to being the DS computer and had less chances of crashing.

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

we use a mac mainly for battery life 6-7 hours is nice

Re: Mac DriverStation?
 

This is sort of an old thread now, but as Macs gain market share (11-12%) compared to windows, more and more teams are going to want to start using Macs to program and drive their robots natively through OS X. It would be beneficial in my opinion for NI to create a port of LabView that runs natively on Macs. Like others have said, they have great battery, they are small and light and for a MacBook Air, an i7 and 8gbs of RAM would do a heck of a job doing video processing to take load off of the cRio.