I have a Dell Inspirion 8500 which I purchased for about 1400$ earlier last month. It comes with How swappable drives 3.5 floppy / dvd cd rw, Serial and USB ports Modem NIC VGA and Printer Ports. a 1394 Slot, PCMCIA slot, and S-Video
The laptop is running some top of the line equipment P4 2.2 or 2.4 GHZ
256 Ram Upgradeble to I think 2 GB, 30GB HD and ATI 9000 Mobile Graphics
All in all there are big name companies which still produce laptops with some of the worlds oldest ports (serial)
I found my Dell 8500 under the refurbished section of their website.
Buying the USB -> Serial Converter would be alot cheaper then re-designing the entire unit. espicially one that is not to big and bulky. Yes USB would be nice but until the DB9 ports have been eliminated from any and all electronics IFI will probably not change to USB.
Though maybe if you ask them nicely enough they may make a special edu-controller with USB to see how it will all work out !!!!!
before converting the official IFI controller
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Past FIRST Robotics Events that I proudly volunteered at:
FLL: NY State Competition '03
FRC: NYC Remote Kickoff '04 & NYC Regionals '04-'15 ,'10-'13 & NJ Regionals '06-'10, Finger Lakes Regional '09 & SBPLI Regional '08-'15 and the World Championship in '05 (Galileo Field) '07 (Newton Field) '09 (Practice Fields Attendant / FTA(A)), CeBIT Convention in '04 & NextFEST in '06 both held @ the Javitts Center, Monty Madness '07-'10, Panda-monium '08, B.Eruption '08 & '09, Ramp Riot '08, PARC '09 & '10, BR^2 '09 & Wol. Inv. '09 -'15
2015 FIRST Robotics Off Season Events that I hope to volunteer at:
Where is Wolcott Invitational
2015 FIRST Robotics Events that I will be volunteering at:
SBPLI Reg. & Championships
Volunteer Resume:
Alt & Lead Team Queuer, Field Repair/Reset, Field Setup/Breakdown, Spare Parts Attendant, Field Power Controller/Score Keeper, Co-Emcee & Official Scorer, Control System Advisor, FIRST Tech Advisor Assistant & recently Practice Field Attendant.