[Robostang 548]

The only problem I would see with doing this is that it must be powered by the robot battery, which means that once the match starts, then you can start it up. By the time windows will start, your match will be over.

Actually, a laptop would qualify as ac ustom circuit. I doesn't have to be routed through a victor or spike because it isn't a solonoid or electromechanical device like a motor. The rules say that a custom circuit just needs to be on a 30 amp breaker with your option of smaller fuses on the line running to it. So technically, the laptop would have power as soon as you set up your robot on the field. By the time the announcer finished stating the team names it would probably be booted(except if you are using windoze vista ).

My team is using a Linux coprocessor this year. While we aren't using a laptop necessarily (screen+keyboard=too much weight) we are using full computer. We took a mini-itx motherboard and set it up to run off the robot battery. The only violations we managed to find (and I personally think would probably go unnoticed when our robot is being inspected) were the system clock battery and the cooling fans. We can get by without the system clock battery because we don't really need to keep time. I'm not sure if this is an actual rule or not, but some of my teammates said that there is a rule that states that all fans used on the bot must be the ones in the KOP. In that case, we can just replace the cpu cooling fan with a muffin fan from the KOP because it uses the same power. As to the issue of hard drives, we are using a solid state flash disk. Other than power, I think you could put a laptop on the bot if you want to.