Offseason event Wifi suggestions?

[frasnow]

On Saturday my team went to an offseason event where there were major Wi-Fi connection issues for the majority of teams. I’m hoping people who have run offseason events can give some suggestions about the cause and how the event can be better next year.

It was a combined FRC and FTC event in a university basketball arena. The FTC field was using a field management system, while the FRC field was not. Prior to the beginning of the match my team ran a number of successful autonomous practices and tested our minibot deployment from across the field. We were in the first FRC match and it was about to start when all of the robots suddenly started having connection problems. There never really was a good match for us. We ran autonomous pretty successfully, but once we drove half-way across the field at the beginning of telop, we’d start to drop our connection randomly. We’d continue to drop our connection as we tried to score a tube and it was clear other teams were having similar issues.

Many suggestions were made about the cause of the Wi-Fi issues:

The openness of the basketball arena
The FTC field management system (they were having connection problems too)
The university’s Wi-Fi
The robots sharing the same Wi-Fi channel (changing this helped some, but wasn’t perfect)
Routers not being set to N only
The chicken wire in front of the drivers
The university’s Mars Rover being demoed (one of our students suggested this as a joke)


There is one thing I should mention about how teams were connecting. Some teams used their D-link on bridge mode with a router and some teams used their D-link on access point. Teams using their D-link on access point had to setup tables at the side of the field in order to get a connection. My team had a router.

Needless to say, I was disappointed the event didn’t go better since it was so good last year. Last year it took place inside of a room that was not much bigger than the FRC and FTC fields. For us the event was in town, but I really feel bad for the teams that travelled five hours to get there.

Any suggestions from people who have run offseason events? Or threads I should read on this subject?

[frasnow]

Oh, I forgot to mention the hosts of the event thought it could be other Wi-Fi devices in the arena (e.g. smartphones). There was a pretty funny moment when one of the announcers started naming SSIDs of networks that needed to be turned off and the list included the numbers for teams that were on the field. :o

[Thad House]

I was there and saw all the issues, and spent today trying to figure out how we could have made that work better. one way i found was to download the FMS FIRST posted in 2009. this would have used just 1 router instead of 6, and would have worked just like the competition. This was what we should have used, and would have fixed most of these issues. hopefully we can use this system at omsi in october in order to not have these issues again because it made the scrimmage alot more difficult.

[Dale]

For what it's worth our off season events last fall, Girl's Generation and Bunnybots, all worked fine with separate routers for each team, just like they would in the lab. This has the advantage of not having to do all the usual setup stuff you would do normally at a competition. We just ask that teams set them up in accordance with the FIRST guidelines. The FIRST Field Management system has been known to be hard to set up and troublesome when it doesn't work so we didn't want to deal with it. Last year at OMSI, mentioned earlier, we were down for an hour while they tried to get it all working. I think in the end we just went to separate routers.

At our events, though, we don't have an FTC field going at the same time and the building where this is held just has a single access point for the campus. This was also using last year's radio configuration with stand-alone routers and the older game adapters.

The Dlinks all need to be set to Access Point mode.

I'm hoping that now that the stand-alone router has gone away that everything still works for off season events. Has anyone else run an off season event without using the Field Management System with the 2011 configuration? Do the Classmates do N band? I suspect they may not or don't do auto channel select which could be the problem. Being down in the crowded 2.4Ghz band would be very bad!

[EHaskins]

Disclaimer: I have never run an offseason event, but during the CARD event in St Louis I had to troubleshoot my team's communication system which is a rip-off of the FRC system, and I've spent too much time exploring the inner workings of the FRC protocal.

one way i found was to download the FMS FIRST posted in 2009. this would have used just 1 router instead of 6, and would have worked just like the competition.

You do not need to use the FMS to use a single router. You can run a single router with multiple robots so long as their IP address as configured per the FRC specs. Just have all of the robots get configured to connect to your router, and have all of the ClassMates wired into the router to reduce wireless traffic.

Do the Classmates do N band? ... Being down in the crowded 2.4Ghz band would be very bad!

The ClassMates are B/G only.


My suggestion would be to invest in a business grade, NOT small business and NOT gaming, access point, and have all teams connect to your AP. Run wired connections from your AP to each of the driver's stations. You do no need the FMS to do this.

A good router and three switches (one for each alliance station and one for by the AP) will probably cost you $600-800, but I believe this would resolve most of the issues.

The AP should also be placed near the center of the field to reduce the maximum distance it needs to communicate.

You may be able to get by with less than this. We tried 4 different consumer routers in St. Louis which all preformed great in the lab, but fell down when they were in such a noisy environment. When we finally got a good AP everything was perfect. Your experiance may be different.

[Joe Ross]

Do the Classmates do N band? I suspect they may not or don't do auto channel select which could be the problem. Being down in the crowded 2.4Ghz band would be very bad!

The classmates do not do N. As you suspected, everyone was using 2.4 ghz.

[yarden.saa]

It's seems like what happen in Israel Regional last year.
The problem was solved by changing the law in Israel; last year we couldn't use 5 Ghz because it was military signal but this year we used it thanks for the law changing, but I don't think you had the same problem.

[Thad House]

Yes. 5 ghz does and did help alot. my team (2898) was using my laptop with 5 ghz, and never had any connection issues, but we did see many other teams have issues. i do believe 1 router would help, and i would be willing to test this and see how well we can get it working.