Radio discontinued?
 

Has anyone caught the end of sale announcement by Open Mesh on the OM5P-AN radio?
See https://help.cloudtrax.com/hc/en-us/articles/209783793
The Open Mesh replacement is OM5P-AC and has some differences.
I'm not sure what this means to the control system...

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

Router for one year? I'm fine with it. Please let us not use OpenMesh again

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

As a CSA, I want to do a happy dance at this news. I've said it before, but if I can switch the wires to the two ethernet ports and cause or fix issues, it is not a piece of hardware for high school robotics.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

I notice that the announcement is dated April 1.

Coincidence?

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

Possibly, but there is a similar article for a slightly different model dated the 11th of April.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

The Open Mesh radio has been a huge improvement over the dlink in its handling of high bandwidth situations. If I saw bandwidth usage like this on the field monitor last year, it would have scared me.

Attachment 20583

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

I love the Open Mesh.. programming them and getting those to work has been great in comparison. The old D-Link's never seemed to want to auto program.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

On the upside the replacement Open Mesh does have a faster CPU... Perhaps it'll boot faster?

One can hope.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

This. Being on the drive team it was painful if you didnt properly turn on the robot and had to quickly run on and turn it on, waiting for a couple minutes waiting for it to boot (happened to us once) or if the radio resets itself right before a match and you get bypassed because of it (happened to another team at an event a couple weeks back)

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

I would prefer going back with a wireless router / radio / wireless AP with at least 3 Ethernet ports.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

Do they provide a radio each year in the KOP, or only the rookie kit?

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

Veteran KOPs only get radios (or other control system elements) when the model changes for everyone and FIRST outlaws use of the old models (for compatibility or availability).

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

We have too many D links for this to be true. (I don't think we ever bought one)

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

Extra components have sometimes been offered through FIRST Choice, especially at end of model life. I think I picked up extra DLinks for my team through that avenue.
It's easy enough to follow where our parts originated by checking the yearly KOP checklists and corresponding lists of FIRST Choice offers.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

Something interesting is looking at the OM5P-AC, its looks like in order to meet new FCC standards they are not allowing external firmwares to be loaded onto the device. With FIRST wanting to write their own firmware this could be a problem for pretty much any new radio they choose.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

That limitation was the source of one of the fatal flaws in the DLinks.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

If the Manufacturer approves the new firmware, then it is ok to load.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

My understanding from Beta testing is the FCR firmware really isn't custom. You can download it from AndyMark. The FRC version uses specific configuration profiles.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

I really hope the replacement has a boot time of 10 seconds at most. Programming the routers for events this year took way longer than before.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

The router's embedded web server is a major contributor to the boot time. If teams can live without a convenient web interface to the settings, perhaps it can be removed from the FRC-specific firmware.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

That wouldn't be too bad if there was just a file to edit. The router config could also then be done by simply copying over the file.

Re: Radio discontinued?
 

Web server is essential to configuring the router when you can't get the software to work.

I don't see why they can't have the basic functionality of the router boot quickly, then let the webserver boot up in a parallel process.