Link to drive will not always be public. Too risky in terms of stall,burnout and damage to bot and its environment to leave it running. You can however watch on ustream and see team members driving via the web.
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-robot
From time to time we will make it available for driving by the public. The link will be posted in the ustream chat.
You can also look at the status of the Samantha system eg. batery voltages for the NXT as well as the main 12V battery... IP address of who is in control of the bot and a bunch of other stuff here.
Will post this address after we evaluate the security/damage risk.
On board video will be the next step.
FYI: ustream is delayed by 3+ seconds and is almost useless for control unless you are thinking hybrid mode like FRC 2008.
The video latency and frame rate on the driving applet was just improved by moving from grabbing individual jpegs to streaming motion jpeg. The camera is and axis207W. Very similar to the AXIS cam used for FRC.
THANKS
Thanks to John Toebes (creator of the FTC Samantha wireless control system) for providing the challenge of doing this... as well as providing information on protocol. So far we are really happy with the SAmantha system. We are FTC Rookies and the Samantha is apparently well received by other teams who suffered difficulties with the previous Bluetooth system.
HOW WE DID THIS
We had been thinking about this for a couple years now in terms of a web app for the general public. We had actually driven the FRC bot via wireless using the camera during the 2009 controls system beta test in partnership with team 842. It was basically the very first thing we did when we got the 2008 bot driving with the cRio. We never did get it running on the web though.
Then last Wed.on the Samantha Conference call with John Toebes I asked about getting access to the protocol for this purpose and John mentioned that some teams had talked about doing this but nothing had been accomplished yet. He agreed to provide some info on protocol. To keep it simple, we did not want to do a custom app on the bot but rather just have our over the WEB control system masquerade as an FCS.
I was not however able to contact John until Friday night but we (mostly Borna) started coding the Java applet Thursday night. On Saturday, using Wireshark we sniffed out the essence of the protocol in an hour and got that going (Borna remotely via screen sharing on skype) but could not sort out the initialization (related to the pairing process) that is used as part of the "security" to prevent unauthorized IP address form controlling the Samantha. FYI, the Samantha is WiFi. After a discussion with John on Saturday, he agreed to cut a version of the Samantha code that could be initialized in a mode that does not use the pairing and this allowed the Java applet that we had developed to run with almost no modification. We were driving over the WEB by midnight Saturday. Then we embedded the video into the JAva applet to make it even cleaner. Borna and Austin have been tweaking and polishing it since then.
One of the more difficult things was figuring out how to do a security certificate for the Java app so that it will run over the WEB. No problem developing on a LAN but as soon as the browser sees that it is on the open WEB, security precautions go up by some 30 dB.
We will get a writeup on either the Team 39 and/or the Team0x27 (NURC) web site.
Regards
Frank
Mentor
FRC Team 39
FTC 4314
NURC 0x27