Are we required to use the classmate computer at the competition?

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by stevend1994

The only thing is, you'll want to keep battery life in mind, they don't give you an outlet to plug your laptop into if it's not a classmate(last year we sometimes hit issues with REALLY long queing times...)

We encountered the same problem as our classmate aged. The battery life seemed to decrease like crazy after 2010. To remedy this we took an older robot battery that had been set aside for practice and testing and hooked it up to an inverter on our cart. Whenever we left our pit we'd plug the classmate into the inverter. Worked wonders for preserving what little battery life that thing had left. Something like this would do the trick for most teams: http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-0626.htm