Driver Station Suggestions

[Siri]

If you velcro down the standing joysticks (as opposed to storing Xbox controllers in velcro loops), be cognizant of the velcro's affect on joystick movement. Depending on the joystick, mapping and the driving style, the slop of the velcro can non-negligibly affect responsiveness. Sometimes it might have a positive smoothing effect; sometimes you see drivers slamming joysticks around while the entire thing lifts 1.5" off the baseboard. A lot of the fast DT drivers I see that use joysticks will have them rigidly mounted and/or sandwiched in between layers of material (often polycarb) for this reason.

We've grown the prefer an old briefcase, modified to stay within the 12" when open, though we're still working on improving it. Ours holds the laptop, drive team binder (scripting options, documentation), the 2 Xbox controllers, spare cables (Ethernet and the Xbox adapters), and the hardware for our driver's head's up display. It's also nice to be able to close it all up and latch for transport.


On last check, make sure your laptop and any other electronics can vent and cool properly. Laptops are not big fans of velcro over their vents. (We didn't actually learn this the hard way, but we picked it up from the robot side of things.)