For those that want a look at Gen 2 of the control system driver’s station: http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/2009/09/good-afternoon-teams-well-be-shipping.html
It goes to some of the beta teams almost at once.
And there are some other items of interest, too.
Is that a USB E-stop button?
(Anyone notice “Team 111” on the driver station? Peculiar.)
Excited to test new shiny equipment with what looks like live camera feedback.
I just hope that’s not an app running inside an OS…
We’re getting a bit far from KISS ifi interface I loved so much.
Interesting to us too. We weren’t involved in the new DS (this picture is the first we’ve seen of it), so I guess someone at FIRST randomly chose our team number for testing.
Looks like a labview app to me. There’s no real way that you could run something as complicated as a Classmate without an OS. I certainly understand your concern though - a reboot of the Classmate could take longer than the whole match.
OK electronics guys, whats the board hooked into the USB port?
You mean the breadboard (white board) or the fancy board that is making us capable of using custom circuits?
I am happy to see the size is still manageable. I hope power is going to provided on the field as a standard in case someone doesn’t charge their batteries.
A guess only, but my assumption is that that’s a board which allows you to hook up analog and digital signals, i.e. the equivalent of the analog and digital I/O on last year’s DS.
Can we have IFI back now?
This is the new driver station? Seriously?
Seems kind of kludgy, not to mention bootup times on the Classmate.
What was wrong with the 09 Driver Station? It wasn’t perfect, but it wouldn’t have been that hard to fix.
From the picture is seems to be a Intel Clamshell classmate so here are the specs for it:
http://www.classmatepc.com/where-to-buy/clamshell/tech-specs/
I also noticed that the Wifi indicator is lit, could this mean that we don’t need to use a router any more?
Oh, that’s an interesting observation. If somehow the disable button, the circuitry on the right (which I assume is for custom inputs like pots), and the USB hub were all integrated together into one box, I would take back my previous post calling it “kludgy.”
I imagine the final version will at the very least have some kind of shiny enclosure. I edit:hope that the DS is not an application running on top of an OS either.
Can’t say I don’t miss IFI though…
Doesn’t LabView have to run on an OS though?
The screen in the picture looks similar to the “Dashboard” in 2009, but not quite, which is why I’m assuming its some sort of Driver Station code.
I imagine FIRST isn’t going to change the externals of the classmate at all.
I don’t see how, when we’ve already been told we’re getting the classmate PC. There’s no way this is getting repackaged into something less kludgy. Maybe they’ll have all the accessories inside a project box or something. Hopefully this year they have the foresight to include some pullup resistors so we can use non USB joysticks without making everything even more kludgy…
Whatever though. I just hope it works. There’s going to be a LOT of standing around for 3 minutes waiting for these to reboot so a match can start if it’s anything like last year.
Amen.
Significant advantages of this please? Thanks.
I think you guys are jumping the gun big time. Assuming they put the USB hub, E stop, and I/O breakout into a single, well-designed enclosure, what’s the big deal? How many teams don’t mount the operator controls to a nice piece of lexan, plywood, or something else?
As far as startup time, the clamshell PC boots from a solid state flash disk and usually runs a stripped down Linux distribution - we’re talking 15-20 seconds, tops. (Though if they make us run Windows XP, I will cry.)
So what are the advantages of this arrangement? To some extent, it all hinges on what aspects of the Classmate they let you utilize. But here’s my stab:
The clamshell has built-in WiFi. We could potentially eliminate the need for a router.
The clamshell has a battery. Hauling AC adapters around to demos has gotten pretty old.
The clamshell has audio playback, a microphone, and an optional camera. There is opportunity for innovation here. Imagine a game where in “autonomous” mode you could talk to or gesture to your interface without touching buttons.
The clamshell is much more capable a computer than even the cRIO. If they let you write code for it, you can suddenly offload some complicated (computer vision) tasks.
Every team now has access to a sort of dashboard app without having to pony up their own laptop. This helps not only the teams, but also potentially FTAs and staff to troubleshoot problems from the driver stations.
Lastly, it says the clamshell has a water resistant keyboard. Perfect for dealing with all of the splashing from next years’ water game.
This is what I meant by shiny enclosure.
Last year, many people had trouble updating the firmware on the DS (you needed a “magic” flash drive to get it to work). This year updating should be trivial.
Last year, many people had issues with ESD damaging the DS. As the classmate was designed as a consumer device, it shouldn’t have any ESD issues. Hopefully the same can be said about the add-on boards.
Last year, the DS took time to boot. Since the classmate has a battery, you should be able to have it booted long before you reach the field.
Last year, you couldn’t tether the robot on the field without access to AC power for the DS. Since the classmate has a battery, that shouldn’t be an issue.
Last year, FIRST had to deal with Kwikbyte for firmware updates. Since it looks like a LabVIEW application, that shouldn’t be an issue.
Last year, you couldn’t use an Xbox 360 controller. Presumably, that wouldn’t be an issue with the classmate.
Overall, I heard a lot of dissatisfaction with the DS last year. This is FIRST’s way of addressing that dissatisfaction. If the DS wasn’t really so bad last year, I hope that people will think twice about complaining about anything and everything, because the result might just be worse.
I updated my Beta Test Team map to differentiate between teams that get the hardware to test. Overall, it looks like Geography and language choice played a large role. There are 6 teams getting hardware for each programming language. It also looks like they were spread out so that only one team in an area gets the hardware.