[apalrd]

We found last year that Cypress comm issues are often caused by the Cypress driver on the laptop end - Apparently it can sometimes hang when coming out of standby, and there is absolutely no way to restart it (with the locked-down driver account we had last year), without restarting the computer. Since the Cypress board was vital to our robot, we would start up the Classmate two to three matches ahead of time, just in case we had to reboot. It drained the Classmate battery, and was terrible, so we were often rushing to keep the laptop charged because of the lack of power on the field.

I haven't heard of any fixes to this issue, although the new rule allowing any laptop would make it seemingly easier to reload the Cypress driver without rebooting.

Related note: Don't boot the laptop unless all of the joysticks are centered. At Kettering, in Qf1-2, we got stuck on the rack because our joysticks weren't centered, resulting in a near inability to drive.