My team is developing a new driver station for use in the upcoming seasons. In my knowledge our team has not had a formal driver’s station that goes on the shelf so we just carried the laptop and controller to the driver’s area. I have seen many different driver station with different layouts. I was wondering what features are useful, useless, or nice to have. Thank You
Velcro on the bottom to match the driver’s station. Might save you from having to dive to catch the board during a match.
Light weight. You do have to carry the board.
Handles of some sort. You do have to carry the board.
I definitely agree with EricH on the board being lightweight and having handles. I would also add:
a. make sure the handles are comfortable to carry (we’ve made that mistake)
b. if this person who will primarily be carrying it has a small arm span, don’t make it so long that they can’t carry it (read: i was short drive coach with short arms)
c. i would suggest attaching the pieces (joysticks, laptop, etc) to the board in some way for stability. We normally use Velco so we can pull stuff off and stick it back on.
d. aesthetics can be nice. We’ve use 80-20 on our robots a lot so our drivers console uses 80-20.
The best picture I could find of our 2013 one (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=502657363125933&set=a.502657019792634.1073741826.171023236289349&type=3&theater)
One suggestion I had here was build your driver station and carry it around all day at school, setting it up for each class. If you can move it down the hall and get it ready before the bell rings, you got a winner. To which I should add – carry it around safely all day, and not end up as a bulky deadweight.
Some students finally finished our driver station for this year’s competition. It was a plastic suitcase (like a professional camera case type) with foam inside cut out in the shapes of the controllers. A small laptop was attached inside, on the top part, so it could hinge open, with a connector to the field made thru the wall. A nice “W” plate in the back (facing the field). Velcro on the bottom.
I agree to the lightweight and portable aspect but i think there is one bigger thing you need to be sure of.
Make your driver station is useable and comfortable to use for driving the robot at competitions. If you have a driver station that you don’t like because you aren’t comfortable with using it, is a bigger issue. Ex tilting your joy stick (the whole thing) forward to make it easier for you will benefit you a lot.
A driver station that prevents you from getting disconnected from your robot will help too. Sounds silly? How can your driver station prevent you from being disconnected from your robot? Well ask 1114. Last year at GTR West in Finals 2 2056 ran into the driver station wall, the ethernet became disconnected and they were their sitting died on the field. This year they designed a simple driver station that would stop that from happening again. They put foam around the ethernet, and joy stick controller plugs so that any impact or small movement wouldn’t unplug the cables.
Also another thing that we liked this year was that we put a strap on it, that way we don’t have to hold it, it is just being held by a strap around your neck. We used a guitar strap for ours, and it works really well.
Use a better laptop than the classmate if possible.
The driver station that my team has used for the past two years is a piece of carbon fiber, which was donated by one of our main sponsors, with our laptop and joysticks velcroed on. This is the lightest, nicest looking driver station we have had.
If it is small enough and light enough you shouldn’t need any handles, but thats your choice.
The main thing to remember is that it has to work. One thing to do is ask your drivers to see what they want/ like. They are the ones who will be using it the most so if they don’t like it then it doesn’t do you much good. Just something to keep in mind.
Adding velcro to the bottom of your joysticks and laptop is a great idea! We do that too.
And, as EricH said earlier, make it light!
I’ve also always wanted to try to make a folding driver station so it can easily be fit through doorways.
Our driver station was made during the week before our first competition. It was a simple piece of 3/4 plywood cut to 30" by 8". We use some old Logitech controllers, driver on the left, operator on the right, each with a piece of Velcro on the bottom of the left handle. To carry the station we made 2 handles from scrap extruded aluminum that were bolted together and then filed smoothly to avoid any cuts. The computer was attached to the station by two large pieces of Velcro that kept it firmly in place, yet not too much so that the computer could be removed if need be. Another thing about our wooden driver station, it only took an hour to cut the wood, give it a quick sanding, spray paint the top white, spray paint a stencil of our logo on each of the controller spots (color coded for the driver and operator controllers) and then attach everything by Velcro, and bam! Driver station 
If you velcro down the standing joysticks (as opposed to storing Xbox controllers in velcro loops), be cognizant of the velcro’s affect on joystick movement. Depending on the joystick, mapping and the driving style, the slop of the velcro can non-negligibly affect responsiveness. Sometimes it might have a positive smoothing effect; sometimes you see drivers slamming joysticks around while the entire thing lifts 1.5" off the baseboard. A lot of the fast DT drivers I see that use joysticks will have them rigidly mounted and/or sandwiched in between layers of material (often polycarb) for this reason.
We’ve grown the prefer an old briefcase, modified to stay within the 12" when open, though we’re still working on improving it. Ours holds the laptop, drive team binder (scripting options, documentation), the 2 Xbox controllers, spare cables (Ethernet and the Xbox adapters), and the hardware for our driver’s head’s up display. It’s also nice to be able to close it all up and latch for transport.
On last check, make sure your laptop and any other electronics can vent and cool properly. Laptops are not big fans of velcro over their vents. (We didn’t actually learn this the hard way, but we picked it up from the robot side of things.)
Ever since being exposed to FLL, I like to use Dual Lock for this kind of application. Makes things snap nicely into place.
Just don’t let your drivers rip them off like those shelves in Senior Solutions. Like many an FLL robot, there are FRC drivers out there with an amazing capacity to lift up anything not nailed down, particularly when on the end of a conveniently joystick-sized lever arm. 
Seconding this big time. Our old driver station was very wide, with handles on the very ends. I’m 6’1", and I was uncomfortable carrying it. It was made of 80/20, so we ended up cutting down the long bars of it, and brought it down to maybe three feet wide, or a little under, and now it’s fine, if a little heavy.
I once played with the idea of getting a sheet metal shop to cut and bend a single sheet of aluminum into a drive station, but never made concrete designs for it. Maybe I’ll CAD it up now that I have some free time.
About a year and a half ago, I was interested in taking a crack at designing a custom driver station out of sheet metal aluminum. This was primarily a design exercise for me to learn about sheet metal, but the final CAD looks pretty cool. I took my inspiration from 192’s driver station.
If you’d like, I would have no problem giving you my CAD files. Just let me know.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc1/416077_493312164016345_371188141_o.jpg
We have something that looks cool, but isn’t the most practical one out there. On the other hand, our root cart accommodates the driver station under the robot, so it’s okay.
All the feedback that is given is great and will definitely factor into the new driver station. I just have one more question about this. The group I am working with wants to have alot of buttons off the controller and on the board. These auxiliary buttons could be useful like for an e-stop but how many do you really need to incorporate into the deign? The new station is being built with practicality in the future in mind and our team in the past years has used only a driver. This year we used a joystick but I think our team prefers controllers.
I am a huge fan of the e-stop custom control interface board. But then again, we build a new drivers console every year and mount specialty buttons and switches into the wood board. (We have, on occasion, recycled some handles and some buttons.) We make a new board every year because, while the design stays about the same, the holes drilled into the board for mounting and placements of these holes change based on the user control. If you wanted to re-use the same drivers console year after year, obviously this would be difficult.
While reusing the board would have its advantages, its also nice to give flexibility to your drive team on how they want to control the robot, which is why we don’t build ours in till Week 5 of build season, when the control interface has been decided upon. (Anecdote: In 2012 our driver asked for tank drive because thats what he was always comfortable with. Less than a minute into driving the partly-completed bot around week 5, he turned to me [head programmer] “I changed my mind. Arcade.” It wasn’t a difficult switch, but it shows why its hard to design a user interface without the item you are controlling).
Actually, you could do something that would work.
Get a project box from RadioShack. If you get a decent-sized one, it should cover all the buttons you’d need (say, a 12"x9"x3" box). If you design a space for the box–including a cable routing to an interface to the laptop–and just change that box every year, then you should be OK.
Now, I do wonder why you want ANOTHER E-stop–there’s one set in the driver station on the laptop (I think it’s the spacebar), at the events there’s a Big Red Button in the driver’s station that will immediately disable your robot for the match. But that’s just me.
Thats actually pretty solid idea… We’ve just always made the base out of one piece of wood and designated it as a project for the chassis team to do when they have finished the drive train and are working on the bumpers. But Ill pass along that idea…
I was referring to an E-Stop product - https://www.estoprobotics.com/estore/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=33
I definitely wouldn’t want another auto disable button!
I was actually referring to having the project box on the base or whatever you use. We always did–either on top or inside. Change the box every year as needed.