We’re planning to create a sort of “board” with handles that we can carry around matches for competition this year. We’ve seen plenty of teams with a design like this, it holds the laptop, joystick and buttons or whatever other control system they might be using. If anyone has pictures or designs of their own teams, I’d love to see them.
We have one that is exactly what you described. I’ll post pics the next time I’m in our workspace
My team is making one. The electronics end of things is finished, but it still needs a bottom and handles.
We used this this year.
The final design was a little different than that and it had a stand to hold our PS4 controller.
Here are some from the community:
148’s Driver Station CAD-
https://www.robowranglers148.com/uploads/1/0/5/4/10542658/148-driver_station-2018.zip
971’s (i took this screenshot off a YouTube video. Forgot where. I’m gonna guess this was 2014 based on the Operator stickers.)
Photos taken by Wesley Soo-Hoo
A feature you may want to include is a short male-to-female Ethernet extension cable that plugs into the laptop and stays plugged in. The Ethernet cables for the field and for tethering plug into the female receptacle of the extension cable. This reduces the wear and tear (sometimes literally) on the port on the laptop. We have had a bad Ethernet port on the laptop cause connection problems.
I’m not sure how many other teams have done this, but we put hook tape on the bottom of our laptop and loop tape on the driver station to keep the laptop from falling of when we move it around.
I personally prefer duallock, but the same concept. It’s also a good idea to restrain the cables. If your laptop has a tendency to open too easily, you may want to include a tie strap to keep this under control as well. If you have a handheld controller, provide some way to keep that in one place during transport, whether duallock/hook & loop or something else. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t be fighting the station as you are moving it.
If your cart has a high shelf to store this unit, put some velcro on it to match the field’ shelf.
Here’s ours. Laptop sits on top, Xbox controllers and other things sit below. You could certainly fit a custom button box in there too.
Not necessarily what you’re looking for, but sometimes it’s worth examining what’s out there.
Before laptops, we always made some type of strange fancy box for the controls. Then when laptops and game pads became the way to operate the robot, we made a tray to hold stuff. After a few more years, we figured out that one person can control the robot, and we no longer have a need for anything other than the laptop and game pad–and it’s easier to just have the driver carry that, without any other “stuff”.
From the mid years…and this robot had a convenient place to set the tray. Yes, we had things held in place with hook loop tape.
Here’s ours. The CAD is a little messed up (not sure why) but it gets the point across.
If you bring just the laptop, be sure it’s got hook tape on the bottom that will contact the shelf. I hate seeing laptops break when knocked off the shelf. Not so much an issue in 2019, but in previous years definitely.
Yes, we have tape on the bottom.
I’ll take a picture of ours next chance I get. It’s a gun case that holds our laptop, PS4 controller, and button board. It’s really easy to handle besides the fact that it’s a gun case.
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