[RyanCahoon]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

I think a hybrid approach would be great. Base it around a COTS netbook so we can take advantage of the high-volume production to get a product that costs basically the same as a DS with a much better screen, built-in battery (which would be *perfect* for pit testing/demos/in-queue use), WiFi (no reason we couldn't go direct from Netbook to Robot for at-home testing and skip the Access Point in the KOP).

[snip]

Additionally, to address concerns about teams changing the DS code (which was entirely possible this year, BTW): it isn't that hard to give teams a standard firmware image that they must boot from (if everyone uses the same netbook), and do some code signing and authentication to confirm to the FMS that the netbook's code is what was shipped.

I would really like to see this, then have a similar facility as on the robots, where teams could write and load their own dashboard code that would run concurrently to the competition code. Getting technical for a moment, the team's code could be run inside a virtual machine on the DS, that way all network traffic could be monitored (and restricted if necessary, as it was this year), and if the team code crashed, seg-faulted the operating system, etc, it wouldn't hurt the safety or reliability of the rest of the system.

--Ryan