I have to ask why do you have 25 IPads and where did they come from?
My bet is scouting. Scouting apps are so much easier to use than traditional pen/paper.
Looks like a huge investment but considering such a high volume I’d assume they are using them for more than just scouting.
You can get “Classroom sets” From apple. They are used for educational purposes. I’m guessing thats what these are for. I’m also guessing that these are owned by the school or school board, not the team?
As cool as iPads are, our team:
- designs our robot in SolidWorks
- sets toolpaths for our CNC Router in VisualMill
- programs in NetBeans
- images the cRIO with the FRC Utilities
- drives our robot with the Driver Station
- monitors our live telemetry with the SmartDashboard
- compiles and analyzes our scouting data in Excel
- writes our Chairman’s materials in Word
- produces our marketing materials in Photoshop and Illustrator
Unfortunately for us, the iPad runs a grand total of 0 of our critical applications.
Every year someone brings up the idea of getting a few, and every year I try and convince them the money is better spent on far less sexy laptops and workstations.
Of course, this will be the year where the robot is controlled by finishing progressively harder levels of Angry Birds…
Solution turn your classmate into a tablet.
No, not at all. The classmate does not run CAD, or word, or any other applications for the most part. Also, “turn”? We’re engineers, not magicians. It’s not like you can just chop off the keyboard and call it a tablet. Not to mention that most tablets, including iPads, don’t have USB ports! Where will you plug in joysticks?
Obviously via wireless electricity.
You might be able to use the Microsoft Surface when it comes out.
Why wouldnt someone go with an android tablet that has easy access to a usb port? (and less expensive)
I was going to post this , but I was too slow. I wanted to do this to my parent’s old 17" Acer, but they don’t sell overlays that large.
We received them as part of a large grant we got that included the IPads 25 new desktops and 6 laptops. We use them for scouting, making designs and just fun:)
Solidworks has an edrawings app, I could see how this would be super beneficial to the manufacturing side. They can pull up the bot on the ipad and be able to move it around to see areas that a drawing may conceal.
This is cool! Didn’t even know that existed.
Now when you say “we” do you mean the team, the school, or something else cause if it is the team I would love to know what group was that generous
Also I have gotten our teams class mate to run open office. for the most part it can run programming software and you should think of the us be ports to be a benefit.
Ours crashes whenever we try to do stuff like that. Also, I can’t even understand your last clause. I should think “us be” ports are a benefit? I’m assuming that’s USB, and yes, that’s what I said. Most tablets lack USB ports, rendering them useless with any joystick or gamepad using USB.
They where given to the robotics team and our project lead the way program.