Driver's Stations

[avanboekel]

Everything on our driver station (laptop and joysticks) are held down with Velcro. It works out well for us

[WizenedEE]

Originally Posted by akoscielski3

How does everyone secure the laptop to the driver station. Last year we just had it sitting there and could have easily fell off. I dont want that again.

Oh man, I'm so proud of my way of doing this. What I did was take three 1/2 fabric straps and put two right around the hinges, going down the sides of the touchpad, then one between the touchpad and the keyboard. They would then go down and through slots in the piece of plywood it was sitting on. The straps covered up a few of the keys, but it's possible to type through them, and who types on the driver station anyway?

[plnyyanks]

We uses a CNC mill to make some custom parts for our control board. They include the housings for our joysticks as well as some angled brackets to hold the 1x1 stock frame together. And we put some shiny blue lexan on it and velcroed the laptop and switchbox on top. It came out pretty nice.


The plastic connector things (yes, that's the technical term)


The completed board

[dbeckwith]

Originally Posted by akoscielski3

How does everyone secure the laptop to the driver station. Last year we just had it sitting there and could have easily fell off. I dont want that again.

We used velcro to keep it on our control board, it worked pretty well. You have to make sure you get good velcro though or else it will just fall off. The problem though was that our velcro was a little too strong, and the bottom panel of the laptop kept getting ripped off.

[sithmonkey13]

My team is thinking about switching over to the briefcase style DS. For the teams that use them, do you do anything special to keep the Classmate from moving around, or do you just let it slide? Also, are there any specific cases anyone can recommend?

[holygrail]

I've mentored for two teams. My old team mounted the driver station to a marching band drum harness and that worked awesome. We could walk around the whole school driving the robot. My new team has just been using lexan with a quickframe border. Components are velcroed down. The industrial stuff is very strong. We don't worry about getting velcro stuck to the classmate because that is pretty much its whole purpose anyway. We might try to combine both styles this year.

[BJC]

Originally Posted by AlecMataloni

2009 was our first year with the briefcase as well, IIRC.

BTW, Seeing our briefcase OIs side by side this year during our awesome qualification match at IRI was pretty awesome.

It was pretty sweet. That was my favorite match of the entire year. We need to work togeather more often.

Originally Posted by sithmonkey13

My team is thinking about switching over to the briefcase style DS. For the teams that use them, do you do anything special to keep the Classmate from moving around, or do you just let it slide? Also, are there any specific cases anyone can recommend?

I believe that we use velcro to keep the classmate from moving all around inside the briefcase. The controllers just sit in there on either side. I would suggest an aluminum one because they look classy. When you buy it just make sure that it is deep enough for everything you want to fit. Our's also has some pockets on the flip up portion which we use to hold other stuff like a match list, a couple small commonly used tools, etc. Another consideration.. because minibots are highly likely to come back this year. Last year we had a foam padded manibot case also. It protected the minibot very well and looked quite stylish, we threw some LED's in there to it would light up when opened. Eh, we thought it was pretty cool.