[RoBoTiCxLiNk]

Originally Posted by Bethie42

Yeah, tiled hallways don't help... We have a little scrap of carpet from the local scrimmage in our shop and it's amazingly handy for both testing line-following and spread-eagling on to work on the robot! The aluminum shavings get into the seams a bit but oh well...

I discovered at our scrimmage that finding a bit of fabric or other material that simulates the carpet for testing in one's pit is surprisingly hard. Also our scrimmage had very pale grey tape lines...very nice high contrast, but not really what I expect at competition. Guess who's going down on the floor with the drive team with a screwdriver on day one to calibrate the light sensors.

Programming on the Classmate?! I applaud you. I don't have the patience to change default settings on that thing, lol, much less program on it...and the keys are so tiny. Try programming on a cell phone, I imagine it's about the same.
We are actually planning on taking our desktop computer, my personal PC laptop, and my Macbook to regionals. The desktop is a backup in case the laptop has the fabled 64-bit incompatibility with WindRiver, and the Mac is for scouting use. We did about the same last year, and got told by some scouting team that we had the most computers they'd seen in a pit...said something about that being a scouting criteria, which makes one wonder...

The original programming laptop didn't actually die....but WindRiver just...stopped compiling. It gets to 13% [on ANY program] and then just sits there indefinitely. We reinstalled and everything. It wasn't even particularly slow to begin with...

The keys are very small on the DS, but you get used to it after a while. its pretty handy, using it for all the programming and keeping comms to the driver station exe, then not switching laptops for regional.

we do have a small bit of carpet, but its all curled and needs weight at each end, and its only slightly larger than the robot, so its not of much use. even to sit or lie down on, its very hard to use. i usually just sit on the floor, cross legged with MY laptop that i used to program this year (an actual laptop, not DS) on my lap, right next to the chassis on a cart. and i think maybe ill suggest a mac to the scouting leader or whatever hes called, but pretty much everyone on the team is a pc.

and that sucks about your original programming laptop. we have this really old laptop in our closet with no wifi, and probably about 5 MB of RAM that i was thinking of using to program one time, till i picked it up... very heavy for such a bad laptop...