My team has been thinking of making a new driver station because our computers are old and slow. We started looking for new laptops that have ethernet and we can’t find any at a reasonable price, so I started thinking, could we use a Mini PC?
The idea is have a Beelink Mini PC (with an i5), battery bank, and monitor attached to our platform. We would have the battery charging whenever it is in the pits or in a match, but be able to unplug and walk around so we don’t have to shut down and boot every 2 minutes.
Is this legal in FRC? Alternatively, is this a horrible idea?
You’re not going to find too many restrictions on the driver station computer…other than size or safety concerns. I will however caution you on using a nonintegrated battery. Slight jostling and the computer could lose power. Then for practice at home wifi would be nice (I know some mini pc’s have it but don’t know about that one). You’d also have to have a monitor of some kind. A keyboard and mouse is nice to have as well. Then how big of a battery bank are you thinking? It could pose some travel issues.
Our driver station is a mini pc with a ryobi 40v battery that powers it. I dont think i have a picture. And I dont know any details about it but if you any questions about it I can get some answers tomorrow from people that actually know computers on my team.
I got a picture of our driver station. I thnk we got the mini pc from our school because they stopped using them and we put it on our drivestation to have a dedicated computer for the drive station.
We used a mini-pc for a couple of years for our driverstation. We switched back to a laptop. The mini-pc seemed like a good idea, but we had ongoing issues with spontaneous reboots and power-up sequencing of the battery pack, computer, and monitors. We think that the reboots were probably related to electrostatic discharge (ESD) but we were never able to diagnose fully and cure the problem. Over many years, we’ve had better luck with laptops on all these issues. The main downside of laptops is fragile ethernet connectors and limited USB ports but we know ways to mitigate those issues.
We did not have any issues besides that it’s just heavy because of all the battery and the rest of the driver station. We have only used it in 2023, we used one of our programmers personal laptops before. We have brought it two events and have not had any disconnecting issues or rebooting issues. I would agree with the others to just use a laptop if you do not have a leftover mini PC and everything to make it work just because of the price of it and the possibility of any connections being loose and causing disconnections and reboots if the connections are not completely secure.
which could operate everything theoretically for about 4 hrs straight.
Biggest issues we found was the lack of battery management. We never quite knew how much charge was left and thus we were hyper vigilant about keeping it plugged in while in the pits.
Dual touchscreens on the Mele was not recognized on startup so we needed to go through a calibration process every time we restarted.
Improvements we are planning include
Adding a battery meter
Adding a power cutoff switch so that monitors and powered USB hub would not parasitically drain batteries when driver station was in storage
It’s not light but it’s not terribly heavy. One person can carry it from robot cart to driver position pretty easily.
If you are interested in CAD, I can post it online.
Ask your sponsors how they dispose of old computer equipment. One of our larger sponsors cycles their computers on a three year cycle and they donate them to local nonprofits and schools. Can often get 3 year old top of the line professional series computers.
