Accessing cRIO through VPS

[Legionary]

Hello, my team is attempting to make a robot accessible from a home computer. Like where someone can go from there house and actually test code out. We have suggested programs such as Log Me In Hamachi, TeamViewer and a few others in different methods to do this. I am not experienced on exactly how this works, so I would be thankful for tips on exactly how you would actually connect through a different computer and control the robot from a different place without leaving a huge security hole. Any suggestions or advice is loved.

[ferret_guy]

The problem with that is you would need to keep it on all the time., but if you wanted to you could use logmein and install it on the computer at school and use the web client to access it from anywhere it would simply allow you to access the computer as if you were sitting at it.

[GeorgeM]

I'm afraid I won't be of much help here - although it's a neat idea...

HOWEVER

How do you plan to power the robot? If you intend for it to be accessed from a remote location it would require the "listening" port to be on at all times...

And what if the code sends the robot spinning out of control. (That happened many times to my 2011 robot).

I don't quite see how you would be able to accomplish remote testing code on a FRC Robot...

The protocol for setting up Log Me In is pretty simple.

Perhaps I am a little confused as to what you are asking...

[Isaac501]

We've implemented this using OpenVPN.

Our linux svn server also acts as a DNS/DHCP gateway for the local lan at our build location, as well as providing OpenVPN services.

That said, strict safety precautions should be taken - the robot should be on blocks, and you should never enable the robot with people in the room who don't know it's on. The RSL is NOT sufficient for this.

If you're really good, you'll have a webcam on the local network so you can see if anyone is around the robot, too.