Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

If widespread communication issues were validated, everything would be invalidated. Our win against your alliance in the semifinals (I don't remember if you guys had any disconnected in those matches). The 548/118 win over us in the finals (we had a disconnected 68 in the first finals).

The Head Ref on Newton seemed...quite unwilling to bend about anything, and much less willing to replay matches than any other ref this season, even in cases where there were blatant faults (ie, scoring display froze mid match).

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

Just curious, are the D-Links configured to listen to all the 2.4GHz chatter? If they are, it would certainly seem reasonable to make that not happen!

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

They're configured for only 5 GHz.

It appears that the firmware in the DAP-1522 still listens to 2.4 GHz and puts all the detected access points in a list, regardless of its configuration. It won't connect to anything not on 5 GHz, but it only ignores the 2.4 GHz networks after it has already found and recorded them.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

also include Clearwire's WiMAX service in St. Louis. It uses licensed 2.5Ghz spectrum. Anyone with a Sprint EVO/EVO3D/Moto Photon/Nexus-S/Galaxy-S/Epic and using wireless broadband would be in this group.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

Agreed, if for nothing else than to stop the flood of speculation, aspersions and misinformation that I am seeing here. :mad:

I believe that FIRST will indeed find our why there were problems, tell us all, and fix it once and forever. We just need some patience for them to get it right.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

Agreed.

Went to VEX Worlds and saw hundreds of matches run with no dead robots. This was using WIFI and literally had dozens of the robots on at the same time.

IFI only got better after they left FRC. They have a VEX ARM9 that's more than suitable for vision processing and have a decade of robot competition field experience !

IFI - stands for Innovation FIRST International, they were a company founded by FIRST mentors for FIRST teams.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

I wasn't going to jump into the side debate of using VEX or the old IFI system, but here goes. To preface this, I love the VEX system. I have had one of my own since they came out. I have just over a dozen kits of various ages (including four that are less than three months old) in my classroom, and they get used. We have not done VEX competition as a team, but have been to them as a volunteer and a spectator. I really like VEX. And if we used the VEX system some teams would not see a huge difference in their robot capability. And many teams would see an order of magnitude drop. The VEX system, and the old IFI controllers, are not as powerful or versatile as the cRIO.

As someone who spends a good amount of time teaching kids to program robots, with experience with the current FRC control system, the old IFI system, VEX, Tetrix, BOEBots, Ridgesoft robots and a few other systems, I prefer VEX if I am going to teach the kids so that they can quickly create their own robots. And I greatly prefer using the cRIO if the robot is going to have an autonomous mode that will do something meaningful in 15 seconds and have as many motors and sensors as our robot had this year. We tried this fall to get last year's robot to run using VEX controls, and when we got to three microcontrollers in order to make it work I gave up. And the old IFI system I found harder to use and less powerful. Also, I will admit I have never seen anything quite like the finals happen under the old IFI system or at a VEX competition. But I have seen FRC competition delayed for hours when using the old IFI system. Not because of their system per se but because of how the field management was set up. If VEX competitions had 140-150 pound robots racing around at the rate of speed of FRC robots, they would need a more complex field management system to insure the safety of the people and field. And it might well be prone to significantly more problems.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

I emailed my contact at Quantenna communications today. I sent him a link to FIRST's website. He seemed very enthused about the whole thing, and told me he'd present it to his boss.

I'm not sure how companies become suppliers to FIRST, or if they'll even bite. Couldn't hurt to tell them though. We'll see what happens.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

I am a huge Vex supporter, we hosts two large events with multiple fields every year but there is no way you can compare Vex to FRC in this way.

In Vex your controllers are literally just a few feet away away from the robots. They don't have the high powered motors and other noise generating devices and you don't have 140 monsters running around at high speed that can cause serious harm.

Also just see how well it works when you have a couple kids with smart cell phones in their pockets when running a match.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

Speaking of Vex (specifically the Cortex and VEXnet control system),

-I recently FTA'd a small qualifier (24 teams) in my high school gym. I used three 1.4ghz Celeron laptops donated to me by the school when they got new ones and were literally throwing the old ones that still worked away. One ran the field and audience projector, one ran the skills challenge field, and one ran the two pit displays (rankings on the projector, SC rankings on the laptop screen). We never had any field issues with the scoring computer at all, and ran only one test match. All issues were solved by plugging in the cables or replacing the VEXnet keys (they seem to fail when they heat up a lot after an hour or so of running continuously, but it's not a permanent failure). We did not have a field delay EVER. The DJ (a FIRST student) told me he had a list of dancing songs, and couldn't play them because the field worked all the time. VEXnet is based on 802.11, has connection times under 20s, and allows radio use in the pits.
-The entire cost of the VEXnet field controls was sub-$200 for all of the field control electronics and cabling, plus the requirement for a WinXP laptop. You can download it from http://www.dwabtech.com/main/tm2/ and play with it to answer any of your questions.

-We also use the VEX Cortex control system in OCCRA, where the robots are similar to FIRST:
-115lbs including battery, extra 5lbs if you use pneumatics with the on-board compressor
-no bumpers
-28x38 footprint by 40" tall
-Motors include CIM motors, DeWalt drills, and various automotive window, wiper, van door, seat, etc. motors
-Our Cortex was right in the middle of our robot, in a fairly bad place for interference. This is due to an OCCRA rule requiring all electronics to be in a box for protection of the electronics, and the only place the box would fit was exactly in the center.

-At OCCRA, they had very few field issues all season, and the OCCRA field staff was very good about checking all robots communications before each match, and diagnosing all failures. In OCCRA, there are 8 VEXnet systems on the field at a time, plus any teams running VEXnet in the pits (which is allowed).

As some of you asked about the FRC FMS, here is what I can tell you (I know this is certain):
-The Scorpion Case has a PLC and the FMS server, both connected via Ethernet
-The Cisco AP, sitting on top of the Scorpion case
-The blue start/stop button box, connected via Ethernet
-The SCC's (Station Control Cabinet) sit at each alliance station, and contain:
--Allen-Bradley hardware including an industrial Ethernet managed switch
---This has ports for the Scorpion case, each robot DS, and the switch below
--A generic Ethernet switch - This is for all of the Allen-Bradley remote IO at this end of the field, such as any lights or e-stops or sensors
--Various Remote IO boards for all of the IO at each end of the field, all communicating over EtherNet/IP
-The ref tablets are Allen-Bradley touchscreens, also connected via Ethernet.
-Each driver station is VLAN tunneled to it's virtual WiFi network on the Cisco AP. The rest of the field runs VLAN's for its own use, I believe only one but I am not certain.

Edit: More information
-The lighting on the bridges is DMX controlled, via DMX-Ethernet bridge which is connected to the Ethernet switch on one of the SCC's
-The lighting on the driver stations is controlled via the Remote IO boards
-The bridge sensors are also connected to Remote IO boards
-All of the wiring to the bridges runs under the barriers/bumps. They act as conduits.
-The blue box just duplicates software buttons and the field can run without it

I won't attempt to explain any software, as I'm not an FTA and can't verify my knowledge.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

Question:

- Are all robots Crios and Cameras operating on a single common Wifi Channel ? I believe so. When there are a number of non-overlapping wifi channels available, why would we not make use of them (bit more configuration hassle). Put the camera streams on one channel and data on another. Or 2 robots out of 6 on each channel. Yes the field would need 3 radios I believe.
- also, at a competition where 4 fields x 6 robots are all on the same channel and close enough to each other the RF collision and retry rate must be enormous.

re the comment about the CRIO's being bullet proof. I don't disagree but there is still (always) room for improvement. I have seen a number of glitches and failures where better diagnostics and reporting would greatly help: CRios rebooting randomly, cause unknown, chips blown off their PCBs in the I/O cards. A number of dead $150++ I/O cards.

Also it would be so productive if the CRIo could reboot and reconnect in a second or two. It is a realtime system.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

I saw this earlier in the thread and I know Don touched on it but this is simply not true. Security though obscurity is never the answer.

We have literally hundreds of engineers who want nothing more than to see FIRST succeed for the students (and a lot of intelligent and informed students too). Letting them see how everything works and interacts can't be bad (although we know how much people on CD love to complain, that could be a problem :rolleyes:).

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

Ubiquiti Networks, for one, makes a 3.65GHz CPE unit that is in the $100-150 price point, intended for WiMAX use. These get installed at people's houses in remote areas for wireless internet. They have to get an FCC (US)/CRTC (Canada) license to transmit on those frequencies, but the fee is minimal (I think $50-100), and the license easy to get, because you're transmitting at < 1W.

If FIRST got the FIELDS licensed as 3.65GHz mobile transmitters (not unlike a TV News van), then the TEAMS wouldn't need to do anything special.

Lots of similar equipment exists in the mid 3GHz bands from a variety of manufacturers.

I actually had 2 Ubiquiti NanoStation2s some time ago, and was able to create a 2.4GHz 802.11g network bridging the two, some ~1.5km away, with a stronger signal than my laptop was picking up from a Linksys WRT-54G a few inches away.

I was ALSO able to use one Ubiquiti NanoStation to create a 2.4GHz 802.11g network I was able to pick up with my laptop's internal NIC from some ~2km away, given Line of Sight.

Ubiquiti's gear is built for outdoor use through all sorts of nasty weather, being mounted on masts hundreds of feet in the air. Its built strong enough for FRC's abusive environment.

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

I have one compare that is comparable - BEST. I have been a coach for BEST Robotics for the past 9 years, and BEST recently (last 2 years) moved to the VEX control system. I have been nothing but disappointed by the VEX system used in BEST. Our robots have had many "communication issues" stemming from random drop-outs to random reboots (all while using the default code), and at least 3 tournaments here in Texas had to go to using tethers because the wireless just could not be trusted - when teams play 8 rounds and have a combined connection time of less than a minute, there's something bad wrong.

I'm not here to blast the VEX system, I'm just here to say it's not the bastion of hope everyone is looking for.

-Danny

Re: The communication tides are shifting...
 

As a counter point. I have been running VEX events since 2008 Houston VEX.
When the CORTEX system was first introduced in the college division in 2009 there were definitely bugs and errors.

However in the past 2011-2012 year. I have seen a significant step in quality and reliability in the VEX CORTEX robot and field system. I have helped field tech four events in Texas (Galveston, Houston, Austin Fall, Austin Spring) combined together that's roughly around 400 matches.

Although I'm going from memory, I have seen less than 10 bad matches out of 400 matches. The errors from these matches are typically not using the standard programming template or failure to sync keys.

This coming season, I will carefully document each communication failure to keep better documentation of the field issues experienced with VEX. However I can attest that the system is extremely reliable from years of experience.