Any ideas on a new computer for our driver station?

[Emeralddragon]

This year my team is getting a new computer for our driver station but we've encountered problems with the driver station not quite working on windows 8/8.1. We have a 1000$ and below price range. and will need at least 4 USB ports.

[orangemoore]

What problems have you had with the driver station? I have run in on windows 8.1 just fine.

[Ben Wolsieffer]

The driver station runs fine on Windows 8.1. We used an ASUS laptop running 8.1 last year in competition without any problems.

You don't need a $1000 computer, even for vision processing. I believe ours was around $500 and it has an i5. I would recommend getting an SSD, because it will be bouncing around while its being carried (and also when a robot slams full speed into the plexi). Even if the computer does not have four USB ports, you can always use a hub.

[Emeralddragon]

The the driver station locks up after the first click, the computer gauges still look at the CPU and battery level but it doesn't respond to clicks. We've encountered this on win 7/8/8.1, although the problems happen more often when on win 8/8.1.

The reason of our price range is because we have a sponsor that is donating a computer to the team but would like our impute on which to buy.

[Emeralddragon]

Although getting 2 500$ computers would be good too.

[Addison4300]

Originally Posted by Emeralddragon

The the driver station locks up after the first click, the computer gauges still look at the CPU and battery level but it doesn't respond to clicks. We've encountered this on win 7/8/8.1, although the problems happen more often when on win 8/8.1.

The reason of our price range is because we have a sponsor that is donating a computer to the team but would like our impute on which to buy.

I don't think the OS would really make a difference. It is just the computer. How much RAM does your computer currently have? Also, what processor are you using?

[Emeralddragon]

Originally Posted by Addison4300

I don't think the OS would really make a difference. It is just the computer. How much RAM does your computer currently have? Also, what processor are you using?

The computer is a quad-core amd a8 processor running at about 1.9-2 GHz with 6 GBs of ram.

[Greg McKaskle]

The DS "lockup" is generally caused by firewall such as McAfee shutting down mDNS to such a degree that the DS event loop is not running very often.

I'm not sure of the surgical way to modify McAfee to fix this, but turning it off fixed the laptop that I saw it on immediately.

Greg McKaskle

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

The DS "lockup" is generally caused by firewall such as McAfee shutting down mDNS to such a degree that the DS event loop is not running very often.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2595

If your laptop has an RS232 port and you have a digital storage scope, download RTS_toggle and put a scope on the RS232 RTS pin. You'll see what's going on.

Otherwise, download and run Win32 Process Scheduling demo, and it will display info in a command window.

[Greg McKaskle]

To elaborate on this a bit.

The DS has many parallel loops running communicating to different field, robot, and PC elements. When mDNS was added, it was put into the timeout case of the primary UI loop. If it doesn't return for many seconds, the UI processing of clicks and such will be delayed. The other loops that communicate to the robot are still running on schedule. Soon the mDNS will also be in its own little cage, I mean loop, and if it misbehaves it will be reported on and will not interfere with the other stuff that needs to be done.

I don't personally own McAfee, but wonder if there is a newer version that doesn't freak out when we ask robots to identify themselves via mDNS.

Greg McKaskle