I was wondering if there is a 2012 driver station for mac, i thought i saw some teams using one at competition and was curious, thanks!
Teams are runnin the DS on a Windows operating system on a Mac machine using Boot Camp.
I’m pro-Mac, but I’m just wondering: Why? I know the DS is important, but you definitely don’t need a Mac to run it (The classmate works, and PCs are cheaper.)
They Should open source the DS so that all the OSes can run it.
@SuperNerd256: If you want something more powerful than the classmate, but the only other comp you have is a Mac, then what? The same goes for us with Linux.
@androb4 I wonder if I can do the same through VirtualBox on Linux. Goes to Testing Bench
Lol, yea it should work. You just have to configure the usb and ethernet ports
The driver station is open source, it just requires LabView, which is not.
On Ubuntu, I have gotten the driver station to work in WINE(which I also know works on a mac through macports).
winetricks is broken at the moment, but as soon as it works I’ll post my WINE configuration.
Ok, WINE is being very problematic, I’ll see if I can remember:
you will need vcrun6, all the richeds, richtx, maybe vbrun, probably dotnet30 (you will need dotnet40 and vc2010(2011?) to use the kinect, good luck with THAT), possibly some directx stuff, do NOT install msi2, and maybe wsh stuff.
This is my exact wine configuration:
comdlg32ocx, vcrun2003(I should try updating, now that I have a newer wine version), allfonts, and windows version set to 7.
Huh, I thought there was more.
Come to think of it, the kinect stuff might work now that I am using wine 1.5
Just because?
103 uses an 11 inch MacBook Air. The classmates are…uh…less than desirable, at least in my opinion.
I suppose that if you were looking to buy a laptop with the sole purpose of being your DS, an Air would get on your list for the hardware (unibody construction, long-lasting battery, MagSafe cord to prevent trips to boost your Safety Award cred). Not saying it’d be everybody’s choice.
(We used our programming mentor’s daily-driver 15" (or was it 17"?) HP laptop as our driver station this year. Considering that it was in about eight pieces at one point at Championship, I’m not sure he’d let us repeat that.)
Where is the source? I want it! One idea of mine for an off-season project was to reverse engineer it and make a Linux version, but if it’s open source, I don’t need to reverse engineer the protocol from tcp dumps haha
I’m fairly sure the LabView source for the Driver Station isn’t public, nor is the DS-FMS protocol or the DS-cRIO protocol. The dashboard source however, is public. If you want to work with someone on making a linux (and mac for that matter) version of the Driver Station I’d be happy to help (remember, it can’t be used at competition).
- Oliver
Alexa is right we use a Macbook Air running bootcamp. We do all of our programing with it and use it for the driver station. One of the main reasons I chose the MBair is it runs all day ona single charge. Wirh the cassmate I could just make it thru a single round with the wait time to get on the field.
Why would you want to? With all the connectivity issues already out there, you are adding one more complication. One place that the already heavily loaded FTA people cannot help you trouble shoot. When they say sorry the problem is in your unsupported operation system what are you going to do?
Funny to hear an Apple person talk about open source. :yikes: 
We are running Windows 7 Pro only the hardware is different.
Why would it add another complication??
The MB will BOOT Windows OS normally. Just like on the classmate
I have to say that I appreciate how cross-platform most of the WPI tools are. We can develop and deploy code from any student’s laptop. The smart dashboard runs on anything. Once the robot is enabled, the console is visible no matter what OS is hosting Netbeans. Vanilla FTP gets us into the cRIO. We can visit the Axis camera from any browser.
This pattern breaks when we need to enable and drive the robot. Since the driver station is just talking UDP, you’d think we could drive from any computer.
our team has a mac book with straight up windows 7 no boot camp no mac os it runs the driverstation nicely
Oh I know that it can’t be used at the competition haha. I just got really tired of either finding the classmate or rebooting into Windows to drive the robot when I did all of my development in Linux. I’ll be sure to send you a message when I start working on it in the summer (although I might be swamped with trying to program the swerve drive that we are designing).
The classmate was also older and slower and just…blech.
I get really excited when I get to use that Air. I’m just a big Apple fan. :rolleyes: