[mikets]

Why all the fuzz about spending lots of money buying batteries and inverters? Why not just buy a spare battery for the laptop? So you always have one charging in the pit. Better yet, in addition to a team laptop, one of our students has his private laptop installed with everything including Wind River, driver station, dashboard, and all updates. We have peer-to-peer source control. Whenever we make changes, we push the code to a USB flash drive, so it can be pulled by the other laptop. It actually saved us one time when the team laptop's network was malfunctioning. We just transferred the code to the other laptop and ran with it for the rest of the competition.