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Unread 18-09-2009, 13:13
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Mark McLeod Mark McLeod is offline
Just Itinerant
AKA: Hey dad...Father...MARK
FRC #0358 (Robotic Eagles)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Rookie Year: 2002
Location: Hauppauge, Long Island, NY
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Re: [BB]: Beta Hardware

Quote:
Originally Posted by BLAQmx View Post
I cetainly hope no one has to reimage any laptop at an event due to software problems. At the few regionals I attended and the World Championship I didn't know of any team that had to do this. But this brings up a good question for everyone:

How often have you had to reinstall the Development tools, Drivers (NI-RIO, Ethernet, etc) or the whole OS on a laptop during the build season or at events during the 2009 season?
I saw only one laptop OS rebuild (by a team) during the season as I recall, but that was necessary due to a virus infection. I heard some events had a problem with virus propagation via thumb drives used to install the WindRiver/LabVIEW updates (no first hand knowledge though).

The installation disks I carried with me saw quite a bit of use at Regionals (including one of the teams with us in NYC) and the Championship.
Most of those were due to original installation mistakes, such as, installing FRC updates over the wrong LabVIEW version. At the Championship, a team left their programming laptop at home by accident and had to install everything on another laptop.

The Classmate shouldn't get mishandled as much as a standard team laptop would normally be though. It "shouldn't" be used for casual web browsing and filled up with virus infected casual downloads. We'll just have to see how fast and furious software updates come during this season.

If Spare Parts carries a limited number of Classmates for emergency use, I think the danger will be minimized. Field crew can keep a couple hot at the Scorers table to keep matches moving.
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Last edited by Mark McLeod : 18-09-2009 at 14:12.
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