Use of laptop on robot
 

Everything in me says this is against the rules, so someone please point it out to me or verify it is legal to do so! Thanks!

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Please read the section of the rules entitled "The Robot". As I recall, laptops are not explicitely banned on the robot itself, but they need to use the 12V power supply, not their own battery, which makes them illegal. (I don't have the rules handy, so I can't check easily.)

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

That's retail. So at the least it's only legal if you can find a retail laptop for under $400. EricH has a good point as well. And then there's the question of whether you count then fans and hard-drive motors as extra motors and....

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Depends on this years rules.

You would have to find a way to power it. Extra batteries are never allowed.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

The only problem I would see with doing this is that it must be powered by the robot battery, which means that once the match starts, then you can start it up. By the time windows will start, your match will be over. :D

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

I can't put my fingers on the Q&A at the moment (if they're even up still), but I recall the GDC historically deeming hard drives illegal as they use non-kit motors.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

but you could use a SS drive now. :)

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Actually, a laptop would qualify as ac ustom circuit. I doesn't have to be routed through a victor or spike because it isn't a solonoid or electromechanical device like a motor. The rules say that a custom circuit just needs to be on a 30 amp breaker with your option of smaller fuses on the line running to it. So technically, the laptop would have power as soon as you set up your robot on the field. By the time the announcer finished stating the team names it would probably be booted(except if you are using windoze vista :D).

My team is using a Linux coprocessor this year. While we aren't using a laptop necessarily (screen+keyboard=too much weight) we are using full computer. We took a mini-itx motherboard and set it up to run off the robot battery. The only violations we managed to find (and I personally think would probably go unnoticed when our robot is being inspected) were the system clock battery and the cooling fans. We can get by without the system clock battery because we don't really need to keep time. I'm not sure if this is an actual rule or not, but some of my teammates said that there is a rule that states that all fans used on the bot must be the ones in the KOP. In that case, we can just replace the cpu cooling fan with a muffin fan from the KOP because it uses the same power. As to the issue of hard drives, we are using a solid state flash disk. Other than power, I think you could put a laptop on the bot if you want to.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

you could do it with last years rules if you used a Solid State hard drive and took out the stock fan and used a KOP one (not to hard seeing that mines cooked by a cooling pad since the internal fan died. you could put a lightweight linux distro on it and hibernate it before a match to make it book quickly. not sure it would be worth the trouble though since most laptops dont have allot of IO but i may be useful for image recognition or tracking of objects etc

...forest

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Or build a 19v(thats what most laptops seem to use) DC-DC step up converter, and keep the battery on RIGHT until your about to get onto the field, then remove it to make it legit. In all practicality, laptops are better suited to transmit something over a analog input, and reccive stuff from the dashboard port.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

ASUS eee PC: $349-$399, no fans, solid state hard drive, runs linux or XP, and weighs under 2 lbs.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

So, of course, you'll make sure to solve all these problems before you even consider putting this on your robot....

Annnyways. A good Q&A to pose to the poor GDC early on would be how to account for such a system. Do you price the RAM, processor, drive, power supply, etc separately if you buy the separately and assemble it yourself? What if you buy it as a system? What if you buy a system but partially disassemble it? This obviously similarly applies to mechanical systems, of course, but the PC system got me thinking about it.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Thats a good point. But I suppose if a pc system did get expensive enough you could individually price each component. We got ours on ebay for less than $100 and it included the ram and processor.

-Don

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

just out of curiosity why do you want to put a laptop on your robot?
I could understand for dashboard stuff on the o/i but the robot? (unless you are using it for some crazy powerful camera tracking)

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

2007 Q&A
8.3 Robot Rules - Hard drive on robot?
http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=1095
Q: Are we allowed to have a hard drive on the robot for processing information? Or would we have to use a storage device that has no motor?

A: No, as a disk drive would include an additional motor and would therefore violate Rule <R46>. Solid state storage devices may be used, as long as they are used in compliance with all rules regarding custom circuits.

FIRSTSearch 2007

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

My team tried this a couple of years ago with the vision tetra.

We used an industrial PC board (486 based), a solid state drive w/ linux OS (small kernal, fast boot :D ). We used a 5v DC-DC power supply to supply the 5volts to the board (the board required both 5v and 12v). We used an evaluation copy of a LabView inspection program (available to everyone). We were able to track and pick up the vision tetra ... but it took too long to run the calculations so we never was able to score with it.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Unrelated to this thread, but I'd be a little uncomfortable using a price off eBay for my cost accounting. The GDC often notes that you need to use COTS Supplier prices for things, and I'm not sure any old eBay store would count. I'm quite certain a personal auction of sale wouldn't.

I'm not saying you can't get parts from such places, but you certainly need to get a price from a more standard retailer like NewEgg or something. And if you can't find that particular system at a standard retailer, then you'd need to price individual parts and add it all up. Of course if you can't even find the parts at a standard retailer, then you're in a pretty difficult position since they wouldn't be legal. The reasoning there being similar to the reason we can't use our nice non-jittery kit joysticks from 4 years ago and instead have to use the current kit joysticks or find passable modern substitutes.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

This is the ruling from the condensed Q&A

8.3 Robot Rules
Hard drive on robot?
Hard drive on robot?
Posted by pmm at 01/10/2007 12:54:21 pm
Are we allowed to have a hard drive on the robot for processing information? Or would we
have to use a storage device that has no motor?
Re: Hard drive on robot?
Posted by GDC at 01/11/2007 08:24:38 pm
No, as a disk drive would include an additional motor and would therefore violate Rule <R46>.
Solid state storage devices may be used, as long as they are used in compliance with all rules
regarding custom circuits.

Personally, I think that allowing this type of device might prove interesting in the long run. However, from an inspection point of view, the "custom circuit" would require some serious investigation as to mounting and securing of said device.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

This would be cool....

http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/10/v...act-barebones/

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

I've always been under the impression that the COTS rules apply only to the robot.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

depends on this years rules if your aloud or not!!

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Madison,

Under R11 from last year, the OI was excluded as part of the robot for weight, volume, and cost determination, but was expressly included in the robot definition for all other purposes, including COTS parts sourcing. However, R28 provided a slightly odd loophole, in that it gave permission to re-use unmodified robot components from previous years, even if they're no longer available, provided they weren't custom made for FIRST like the '06 transmissions, etc.

So I stand corrected in that a team that owns older joysticks that aren't modified can use them. But COTS rules apply to anything new you acquire for your OI.

Kevin

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

I looked into this last year. The most parctical thing I found was either a PDA(with a serial port), or a Gumstix unit.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

If you want to send data to the guys at the driver station, just mess with LabView and work it like that. You can use the best laptop you can afford, and you don't have to worry about the rules. The only thing it couldn't do is help with autonomous.

Really, the vision system is way to hard to use, don't try it (3 years of failing)

Good luck if you do try though

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

I still think that the vision system is not too overly complex for FRC teams.
Your practically given a fully doccumented, sources given example find/track driver, that gives you the current size and posisition of the blob thats precalibrated for the green light.

As a rookie programmer, with absolutely no FRC controller experiance, I had the camera dumping useful information on the second day I had my hands on the controller.

Our team did not implement a successful auto mode, simply due to time contraints and lack of forethought for feedback mechanisms. This is what appears to plauge most teams that had no auto mode. It's not the hardware. The CMUcam is ideal for the scenerio that teams were given last year. The software is extremely powerful, yet abstract enough that programmers do not have to worry about manually deciphering the datastream coming out of the camera. It's precalibrated... I don't understand why people are so angry with it.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

I'll agree, provided that FIRST actually gave teams a reasonable chance to actually debug during practice rounds. We had the vision system semi-working for Aim High. I say semi because on the practice field it would home on the light, aim the turret, and spin up the shooter to the proper speed to hit shots dead on. Sadly once it was on the field, it simply wouldn't recognize the light or anything. If we could have actually monitored the debug port during a practice round I'm sure we could've had it working perfectly.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Using the vision system successfully for autonomous is not impossible, obvious by the fact that teams did get it working. The problem is usually testing and debug time. Our team had a fully working autonomous in the 2006 season that scored balls in the high goal, yet in 2007 we weren't able to score due to missing test time. The code was better than the previous year's, and sections of it worked, but actually getting it all connected to work never happened (at the AZ regional this past year we discovered, after all our practice time was up, that our camera had been off the whole time, due to being too rushed to check for that problem).

I'm interested in seeing what exactly is going to be done in autonomous mode that would require an extra processor just to do it.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

I'm still not sure what purpose a full blown PC on the robot serves.

But...


Now I'm super interested. I'm sure you could piece together a small PC with a passive cooling system that can use a KOP fan and run solely off the battery for less than $100 a part. Solid state storage could be as simple as a flash drive that is booted from USB through the BIOS. Those are like..... practically free now-a-days...

Now just to find a reason for all of this....

:rolleyes:
Jacob

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

I can give a good reason.

When we were trying to track the vision tetra we needed a lot of computing power to to image recognition within a 3d space. This was because, while we knew the size and shape of the green panel on the vision tetra, it could be orientated and positioned so that the shape and size would be difficult to interpret.

The best PC board that we could find in the FIRST budget range, at the time, ended up being insuffiecient for our needs ... but it was a great learning experiance for the students anyways.

In the end we were able to track, move towards, and pick up the vision tetra while understanding where we were on the playing field. We just didn't have the computing power to do it and cap within the autonomous timeframe.

With todays small inexpensive industrial PC boards ... it should be possible to do.

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

Another option would be using some kind of an SBC (Single Board Computer). The TS-7200 that EmbeddedArm makes runs Linux and requires no cooling. It does cost $150, but it has a lot amount of processing power (200MHz ARM9 + 8MB RAM). It boots pretty quickly (~3secs with the stock Linux, IIRC), and has serial (TTL), SPI, and GPIOs.

Just another option...

- Taj

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

...So using a Linux Gum Stick won't be a problem?

Thanks,

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220270

You could always use one of those on your robot as a laptop....

Its under price
solid state HD
Not to bad for power
Lightweight (2lbs)
and TINY!:ahh:

Re: Use of laptop on robot
 

This is a good example of a real-world engineering decision. Does the added complexity of a co-processor (2nd development environment, robot<->co-processor protocol, lower system MTBF, extra cables, power considerations etc) outweigh the benefits of the extra processing horsepower? Remember to add in the amount of time it takes to send messages back and forth to the co-processor, you can never miss the reply back to the OI controller! And I think you must process the I/O from the robot controller. So this is not a simple decision, engineers think carefully before doing such a thing in a real-world application.

Personally, I think that only a math-intensive requirement (like the vision processing mentioned in this thread) warrants the addition of a co-processor in these games. Otherwise it is rarely worth it. Implement your math routines using fixed-point or integers and there is considerable processing power on the robot controller.