Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

A few days ago Bill Miller announced that FIRST will be including the classmate PC's in the KOP. Would it be legal to use the touch screen on the PC (with the front panel loaded on of whatever program you may be using) and have the operator control the robot with front panel buttons?

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

We will not know until new rules have come out – which will be on the day of Kickoff.. Unless we decide, as a community, to crack the PDF encryption :)

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But that would kill the fun of tearing our collective hair out trying to figure out some obscure "clues", although I'm sure the hackers here would have quite a ball with the PDF.

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Which we won't.

(Reference some of the older pre-Kickoff threads that laid out in no uncertain terms the unprofessional nature of doing so. Back to talking about Classmate PCs.)

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How much you wanna bet that it's going to be used as the driver station?

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Considering this post on Bill Miller's blog, I'd be willing to bet a pretty substantial sum.

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Not to mention the technical improbability of brute forcing a 10 character key in just two days.

Regardless I believe keehun was kidding.

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Actually the shortest password so far (1GiantLeap4FRC) was 14 characters long.

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Kidding or not, the rules of this forum disallow discussion of cracking. Better to nip it in the bud earlier rather than later.

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No, I think it sounds more reasonable that we'll use it for displaying a dashboard like we could with any computer last year. Plus, now every team will be able to have and bring a laptop with for programming and debugging to the competitions.

I highly doubt that they will get rid of the driver station and just use a computer. They just designed this whole new system for us and plus, now we can't easily hook up switches, LEDs, and lots of joysticks and such. Computers don't have PWM I/O ports.

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I'd have to agree with this logic. Also, myself and the programming and electrical team really didn't find any reasoning for using the laptop itself as the driver's station or to control the robot. I like the current 09 DS a lot b/c of the ease of use.

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I can combine the post from the Next Year's Game Thread that maybe the for 30 seconds or so, the robot will stream a live video feed through the classmate pc and would replace autonomous mode.

This may be a use for next year's game, but idk

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well you could still have i/o ports via usb. I think that using a touch pc such as the classmate would be neat to play around with the dash board with labview. So in theory if they allow doing this, we could have a much larger amount of booleans and knobs and lights that was offered through last years drivers station. Although they are not a physical control, they still work for the purpose! You could also buy a joystick such as last years($25 on newegg) and use the electronics as a usb interface for all of you physical switches, or possibly first will include something of the such with the control system. Really only time will tell (either kickoff or if they release it sooner)

-McGurky

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

Things like this were tried by many. The problem we found was that the packets delivered were too small thus caused lag in the video feed. If there's a way to fix this in the WPIlib then it might be a viable option.

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Here's some pure speculation. NI said they've had a software drivers station for a long time. NI also makes a variety of data acquisition products, which provide digital and analog IO and hook up via usb. In fact, NI has provided them to teams before.

Thus, going to a software drivers station on a laptop doesn't mean that you have to give up IO options. I guess we'll have to see once the beta teams get theirs.

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I have to agree with Joe Ross, I was actually surprised we didnt use a PC and some sort of IO board last year.

Of interesting note, the rules forbid discussion of cracking, they do not however forbid discussion of how secure a system is. Should Keehun desire to understand why it would be impractical to crack the encryption on a PDF. Perhaps he would be interested in the EngineYard contest (which has ended but proves a good point) Baring that, perhaps he would be interested in a small challenge which in no way violates an laws and is only an intellectual exercise (if he is feel free to PM me)

Sorry for the off topic-ness of my post, but I believe that should a student have an interest in security they should be taught about it rather than use any self taught skills maliciously.

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Keehun was more likely than not joking though agreeable that without some obvious indicator of such sarcasm it is good to point out the unprofessional style of such a statement. Needless to say the internet is a poor medium for putting across sarcasm without methods such as <sarcasm> </sarcasm>

Back on topic, in regards to the classroom PC I am sort of on the fence in my speculation of what it may be used for.

In regards to being used as a drivers station it seems like they may want to given the considerable amount of fried drivers stations last year.

That being said, they would have to implement a method of providing teams with analog and digital I/Os, or they could simply cut them. Which may very well happen but I am skeptical that they would deprive teams of a resource with which a team could construct a HUD display. Granted such a device could provide members with a screen based HUD display, but it gets rid of the bright LED system that many teams relied on for its simplicity of being able to be seen out of the corner of one's eye.

Video would have to be altered heavily as many teams have discovered to acquire a steady stream of images. Unless it could be made more compact while retaining quality and not wasting too many CPU cycles on such an endeavor (though we have significantly more power than the IFI system ever let us have)

More likely I think it may be used for the purpose of a heads up display for the co-pilot or the person who stands behind the two operators (forgetting the name of that position). This could provide a large amount of data for teams and allow them to adapt their strategy based on a wide variety of data coming in. If the 3rd person notices an indication of a large amount of slipping they could modify their code next round to improve traction. (We have Traction Control in cars to prevent slipping from happening and sometimes the systems go off without the drivers even noticing)

That does run into the predicament of installing labview on such a device, I remember installing it on a 1.8ghz Pentium M of Keehun's and it was a bit sluggish to install and run.

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Bill, I was totally being sarcastic. Sorry about that.

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Yeah. They say 90% of interaction/communication is human gestures... Sorry Billfred, by saying it out blatantly, I'd hope that one would take it as a joke. I usually put a wink but I don't know why I didn't that time.

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

Field Coach or this year Commander.

One interesting idea I hadn't thought of: What if only the Commander could see out the window, but the Drivers could look at a camera display?

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A few thoughts, how would they implement this. unless commander stands somehow infront and the drivers are behind a board or commander is elevated or something.

Intrigues me though, would have to solve the video bandwidth issues though. Could be cool in a game that requires a lot of precision.

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The first thing that strikes me about using a laptop as a drivers station instead of the blue box is that you can use any computer device to control the robot (not just standard USB joystick interfaces). This means you could set the robot up as a servo, using a mouse on a scale model of the field, or something similar.

The specific example I'd be most excited about is something I've been thinking about on and off over the past couple years; the Emotiv headset. The only problem there being the speed of the computer you're allowed to use.

If they do decide to use the Classmate as the drivers station, I wouldn't be too worried about I/O. There are lots of breakout boards for computer I/O (only prohibition being cost, but this is FIRST, and as has been mentioned, NI is one of the vendors of such products). And if they don't, you can always get a cheap USB joystick from Goodwill, crack it open, and tear all the wires off the board. Voila, instant I/O expansion board. If you get a gamepad, you might even have some digital outs between the LED's and the vibrating motors.

I think it would be a very interesting use of the computer if they blacked out all the windows in front of the drivers and you had to use the camera :yikes:

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Oh great, look what you just did. The GDC will probably find ways to use this to torture teams in 2011. I hope you're happy now.

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Please, they probably already know what the game is going to be. And trust me, there is nothing sadistic that I can think of that they haven't already. Every year, it's the same discussion:

"Last year was so hard! There's no POSSIBLE way they could come up with something harder this year."

They always do.

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Tinted glasses, maybe? Or a hood or something. It would be really cool but probably will never happen.

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just some food for thought, maybe the drive coach will be the only one to look at the pc for the first 30 seconds or so, but he cannot see the field.

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That much time? You underestimate the GDC pretty badly.

Oh? I've got an idea that I'm not sure they've come up with... No, I'm not going to post it. Don't need them getting more evil ideas now, do we?:p

But, they probably don't know fully what the game is going to be. I'm pretty sure (from Bill's Blog again) that they have a general idea, but I'm willing to guess that they don't have specifics (like point values) in place yet.

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Haha, I know. I was just messing around.

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Give the GDC ideas? How can you think that a bad thing? :eek:
If our ideas really do influence the GDC's decisions it means that the potential to manipulate the game through reverse psychology could be practically infinite. (insert evil maniacal laughter here).
...
Or they might already have the next five games already figured out, and are laughing at how far behind we are. Gosh the GDC have a fun job ^_^