[apalrd]

To my knowledge, you cannot. They want all teams to have the same processing power, and allowing communication to the dashboard allows teams with a second powerful laptop for Dashboard to have more power if they can bidirectionally communicate. Also, to my knowledge the FMS system blocks all communication over wireless that did not originate from the Robot, Classmate, or FMS. The classmate gets the data from the robot and passes it to the Dashboard PC, so the dashboard PC cannot communicate directly to the robot.

I have no idea what you would need to get to the robot before a match other than the Autonomous mode, but you should be able to set that with a switch on the Cypress board (or if you don't use it the Virtual IO), or the Analog or DSC inputs on the robot. A simple multi-position switch to an analog input has proven to work well enough.