Suggestion for driver station computer

[carrillo694]

Originally Posted by jgw

At this point, I'd recommend waiting for kickoff in case there are some new rules about drivers station hardware for 2012.

Looks like there aren't any changes, as per <R13G>.

[Doc Wu]

So, now that we've gotten through kickoff, let's bump the topic.

My team is also considering a new driver station, especially in light of the added load of the Kinect.

What are other teams using and having good luck with? What suggestions are out there?

Cheap, rugged, compact would be pluses...

[Greg McKaskle]

If you intend to use the Kinect on it, be sure to consider the HW requirements from the Kinect read me file.


Hardware Requirements
32 bit (x86) or 64 bit (x64) processor
Dual-core 2.66-GHz or faster processor
Dedicated USB 2.0 bus
2 GB RAM
Windows 7-compatible graphics card that supports DirectX 9.0c
A retail Kinect for Xbox 360® sensor, which includes special USB/power cabling


I've seen it run OK on that class of computer, but the i3, i5, and i7 computers had far more CPU left over.

Greg McKaskle

[JohnBoucher]

What version of Windows 7 is necessary?

[Brian Holford]

Is there a Field Control System Setting Checklist for the driver station?

The getting started guide only has instructions for running the setup.exe file on the classmates, not configuring a user ID for a new computer.

Last year our team attempted to use Lenova Laptops instead of the classmate.
The first obvious error that we had was not formatting the "driver" user account name properly (case sensitive).

Then we had several problems with the internet connectivity not being recognized by the field. I'm pretty sure this was from not disabling the wireless adapter but the computer was not recognizing the wired network properly and our team unfortunately delayed a few matches while we were trying to resolve this.

In the heat of competition we opted to go back to using the classmate, but we certainly would like the option of more computing power on the field.

[Greg McKaskle]

The field no longer pays attention to the login name. Driver, driver, or chauffeur, it doesn't matter. I also have not seen issues with the wifi being left on, but that may depend on its IP address.

As to the original question, I can't say that I know of a checklist.

Greg McKaskle