Team 4095 Presents: iPhone Driver Station!

[Greg McKaskle]

That is a very cool achievement, but like Austin, I request that you think about safety and test, test, test. Then consider how confident you are that nobody will be hurt using your DS. Then consider whether modifications to the DS by others are likely to stay safe.

It looks like the app only supports teleOp enable and disable modes. If that is the case, perhaps you should do what the Parrot Drone does, with thumbs-lifted transitioning to disabled. If you implement Auto, perhaps the user has to hold a button to keep auto enabled. Can the robot be enabled when on other screens like camera?

Perhaps you also want a scaling factor on the joysticks. This can be done on the robot code as well, but if others try to drive their robot with the app, can they control it?

What happens when two DS Apps connect to the robot? Same question for a FIRST DS and a DS App? The FIRST DS Apps detect one another and the new one asking the older one to bow out, but that hasn't always been the case, and it caused issues.

To repeat. Cool accomplishment. Be safe.

Greg McKaskle

[Chiller]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

That is a very cool achievement, but like Austin, I request that you think about safety and test, test, test. Then consider how confident you are that nobody will be hurt using your DS. Then consider whether modifications to the DS by others are likely to stay safe.

It looks like the app only supports teleOp enable and disable modes. If that is the case, perhaps you should do what the Parrot Drone does, with thumbs-lifted transitioning to disabled. If you implement Auto, perhaps the user has to hold a button to keep auto enabled. Can the robot be enabled when on other screens like camera?

Perhaps you also want a scaling factor on the joysticks. This can be done on the robot code as well, but if others try to drive their robot with the app, can they control it?

What happens when two DS Apps connect to the robot? Same question for a FIRST DS and a DS App? The FIRST DS Apps detect one another and the new one asking the older one to bow out, but that hasn't always been the case, and it caused issues.

To repeat. Cool accomplishment. Be safe.

Greg McKaskle

This does have support for teleop and auto and the robot stays active if you change to camera view, the camera view is just a camera right in between the joysticks.

And yes it is pretty dangerous to have modified the FRC ds, I have had it where the robot has gone out of control from the joysticks probably getting stuck in a full on state, I will continue to test.

[koluke]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

That is a very cool achievement, but like Austin, I request that you think about safety and test, test, test. Then consider how confident you are that nobody will be hurt using your DS. Then consider whether modifications to the DS by others are likely to stay safe.

Theoretically you should be able to build in safety checks similar to how the DS responds when you unplug a joystick.

Also, regarding closed vs. open source, it should be possible to dual-license the code so that there is an open source version, but make the binaries available on the App Store for a small fee. I found some helpful info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busines...ource_software.

Hope this helps.