A few days ago Bill Miller announced that FIRST will be including the classmate PC’s in the KOP. Would it be legal to use the touch screen on the PC (with the front panel loaded on of whatever program you may be using) and have the operator control the robot with front panel buttons?
We will not know until new rules have come out – which will be on the day of Kickoff… Unless we decide, as a community, to crack the PDF encryption 
But that would kill the fun of tearing our collective hair out trying to figure out some obscure “clues”, although I’m sure the hackers here would have quite a ball with the PDF.
Which we won’t.
(Reference some of the older pre-Kickoff threads that laid out in no uncertain terms the unprofessional nature of doing so. Back to talking about Classmate PCs.)
How much you wanna bet that it’s going to be used as the driver station?
Considering this post on Bill Miller’s blog, I’d be willing to bet a pretty substantial sum.
Not to mention the technical improbability of brute forcing a 10 character key in just two days.
Regardless I believe keehun was kidding.
Actually the shortest password so far (1GiantLeap4FRC) was 14 characters long.
Kidding or not, the rules of this forum disallow discussion of cracking. Better to nip it in the bud earlier rather than later.
No, I think it sounds more reasonable that we’ll use it for displaying a dashboard like we could with any computer last year. Plus, now every team will be able to have and bring a laptop with for programming and debugging to the competitions.
I highly doubt that they will get rid of the driver station and just use a computer. They just designed this whole new system for us and plus, now we can’t easily hook up switches, LEDs, and lots of joysticks and such. Computers don’t have PWM I/O ports.
I’d have to agree with this logic. Also, myself and the programming and electrical team really didn’t find any reasoning for using the laptop itself as the driver’s station or to control the robot. I like the current 09 DS a lot b/c of the ease of use.
I can combine the post from the Next Year’s Game Thread that maybe the for 30 seconds or so, the robot will stream a live video feed through the classmate pc and would replace autonomous mode.
This may be a use for next year’s game, but idk
well you could still have i/o ports via usb. I think that using a touch pc such as the classmate would be neat to play around with the dash board with labview. So in theory if they allow doing this, we could have a much larger amount of booleans and knobs and lights that was offered through last years drivers station. Although they are not a physical control, they still work for the purpose! You could also buy a joystick such as last years($25 on newegg) and use the electronics as a usb interface for all of you physical switches, or possibly first will include something of the such with the control system. Really only time will tell (either kickoff or if they release it sooner)
-McGurky
Things like this were tried by many. The problem we found was that the packets delivered were too small thus caused lag in the video feed. If there’s a way to fix this in the WPIlib then it might be a viable option.
Here’s some pure speculation. NI said they’ve had a software drivers station for a long time. NI also makes a variety of data acquisition products, which provide digital and analog IO and hook up via usb. In fact, NI has provided them to teams before.
Thus, going to a software drivers station on a laptop doesn’t mean that you have to give up IO options. I guess we’ll have to see once the beta teams get theirs.
I have to agree with Joe Ross, I was actually surprised we didnt use a PC and some sort of IO board last year.
Of interesting note, the rules forbid discussion of cracking, they do not however forbid discussion of how secure a system is. Should Keehun desire to understand why it would be impractical to crack the encryption on a PDF. Perhaps he would be interested in the EngineYard contest (which has ended but proves a good point) Baring that, perhaps he would be interested in a small challenge which in no way violates an laws and is only an intellectual exercise (if he is feel free to PM me)
Sorry for the off topic-ness of my post, but I believe that should a student have an interest in security they should be taught about it rather than use any self taught skills maliciously.
Keehun was more likely than not joking though agreeable that without some obvious indicator of such sarcasm it is good to point out the unprofessional style of such a statement. Needless to say the internet is a poor medium for putting across sarcasm without methods such as <sarcasm> </sarcasm>
Back on topic, in regards to the classroom PC I am sort of on the fence in my speculation of what it may be used for.
In regards to being used as a drivers station it seems like they may want to given the considerable amount of fried drivers stations last year.
That being said, they would have to implement a method of providing teams with analog and digital I/Os, or they could simply cut them. Which may very well happen but I am skeptical that they would deprive teams of a resource with which a team could construct a HUD display. Granted such a device could provide members with a screen based HUD display, but it gets rid of the bright LED system that many teams relied on for its simplicity of being able to be seen out of the corner of one’s eye.
Video would have to be altered heavily as many teams have discovered to acquire a steady stream of images. Unless it could be made more compact while retaining quality and not wasting too many CPU cycles on such an endeavor (though we have significantly more power than the IFI system ever let us have)
More likely I think it may be used for the purpose of a heads up display for the co-pilot or the person who stands behind the two operators (forgetting the name of that position). This could provide a large amount of data for teams and allow them to adapt their strategy based on a wide variety of data coming in. If the 3rd person notices an indication of a large amount of slipping they could modify their code next round to improve traction. (We have Traction Control in cars to prevent slipping from happening and sometimes the systems go off without the drivers even noticing)
That does run into the predicament of installing labview on such a device, I remember installing it on a 1.8ghz Pentium M of Keehun’s and it was a bit sluggish to install and run.
Bill, I was totally being sarcastic. Sorry about that.
Yeah. They say 90% of interaction/communication is human gestures… Sorry Billfred, by saying it out blatantly, I’d hope that one would take it as a joke. I usually put a wink but I don’t know why I didn’t that time.
Field Coach or this year Commander.
One interesting idea I hadn’t thought of: What if only the Commander could see out the window, but the Drivers could look at a camera display?