[EWCP] Beta Testing Cast with Jared from team 341

[Jared Russell]

Peter:

Definitely the cRIO FRC-II. It is rated for 9-30VDC supply versus 19-30VDC for the original 8 slot model (via the 24V output from the PDB).

As for laptop specs for minimizing lag from the Kinect, unfortunately I can only offer you a couple of data points.

On our Toshiba netbook (very similar specs to the Classmate), we saw on average ~500-1000ms of latency from movement to robot response. With our core i5 laptop with 4GB of memory, we saw ~100-200ms of latency.* These numbers seem to be consistent with others doing the beta test. The difference in latency is tremendous when it comes to controlling the robot at anything above very slow speeds.

Since the "long pole in the tent" is the processing of the Kinect point cloud data (and not the FRC server application, driver station, or wireless link delay), you can actually test a candidate laptop for yourself before kickoff. If you download the Kinect SDK from here (http://kinectforwindows.org/) and install on a Windows 7 PC, you can run the "Skeleton Tracker" sample app and get a good feel for what latency you can expect for a given laptop.

* By the way, with some laptops you will notice much better performance when running on AC power than while on battery (due to power management settings on the PC).