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 :)

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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.

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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.)

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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

Regardless I believe keehun was kidding.

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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.

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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.

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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.

Re: Classmate PC - Front Panel
 

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.