[FRC Blog] Radio Silence
 

Posted on the FRC Blog, 6/3/16: http://www.firstinspires.org/robotic.../radio-silence

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Good to know, since they're really pricey too.

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Please don't pick another radio that has a 90 second reset time... watching robots die on the field this year was especially frustrating (and common) because you knew it would be for a large majority of the match.

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Meh, not a huge deal either way. I'd like to see them jump to the next generation and get us more bandwidth though. Always a plus.

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I hope the new radios get a back up power supply.

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Pretty sure that'd conflict with R31, as the only exception I've seen is a device that needs a battery to function and will not without it, eg. a smartphone used for vision (like 254).

Otherwise, I'd have stuck a capacitor on the radio to make sure it stays on in the event of a brown-out.

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+1

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As a volunteer who is unfamiliar with the tech used in the bots now, this explains a lot. I couldn't understand why a bot would go dead, then start moving again near the end of a match. That sounds like a horrible amount of time to be out-of-commission.

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If FIRST is working with someone to spec a radio, I'm sure they would allow themselves to write rules that made it legal.

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During our very last match of the season, we lost connection and regained it near the end. Our driver was amazing, though, because he was able to swing the match from a 0RP to 4RP match with only 30 seconds before the match ended. More details here (post #9): http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=148565
That was the first and only time we ever had a problem.

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From what I understand, the problem isn't the hardware, but the firmware on the device allowing the user to change the frequency outside of FCC regulation. For FRC to specifically request OpenMesh build an integrated and mandatory power backup would be complicated and costly. (imho)

The main problem, for me at least, is that the radio takes 90 seconds to boot... If they're working together on a custom FRC firmware why not make one that just boots faster and disabled unneeded features?

EDIT: Approximately 90 seconds, numbers were based on a match I watched and wasn't exactly counting with a timer. Take with a grain of salt.

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Personally I favored the old radios that had 4 ports. This year we had a radio go bad and constantly had problems connecting in our build room. Could be user error or radio problem. All I know is it worked one moment and didn't work another moment with no configuration or connection changes. I also prefer having more ports so that we could connect to the radio via Ethernet without having to use a splitter when the ports were already maxed due to an on-board computer. Also if one port went bad on the old radio, it wasn't totally gone since you could just use a different port.

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Can we please pick a radio with a physical Reset button... if you can't connect to the router because the firmware is messed up, you can't reset it to factory settings either, and that's kind of a terrible catch-22 to be stuck in!

Also I'll add to the growing requests for a radio that boots in less than 90 seconds... This is the single biggest thing, really. I don't understand why minimizing this aspect of a radio isn't a top engineering priority.

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More than 2 ports would be wonderful also.

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I would say it's a top priority for our use... but for a vast majority of use cases, a boot time of 30 seconds versus one of 90 really doesn't make that much of a difference. When you're sitting at home and the power goes out and comes back, do you sit on your couch complaining that your home wifi router takes too long to reboot? And even if you do, does it happen often enough for boot time to be something you actively look for when picking your next router? Companies making routers know that most of the consumer base they're trying to attract won't really be impacted much by the boot time, and instead are looking for things those users do want - small size, strong signal, easy to set up, a nice UI, good security, customizability, etc. So all of that gets prioritized over boot time.

Besides, if it had amazing fast boot time, the engineers working on it wouldn't have any more excuses.

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I meant a top engineering priority for FRC's engineers, not for the people that make routers for home use. When testing routers, a greater focus should be placed on boot time. There certainly are fast booting routers out there, though it's possible they are unsuitable for FRC for other reasons.

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I don't think I ever saw one take more than 60 seconds. 45-50 seconds was more typical. The rest of the delay some people are noticing is from the Driver Station sometimes taking upwards of 20 seconds to establish communication once the network connection is there. That appears to be a Windows networking thing.


It's my understanding that the bulk of the OM5-AP bootup time is in loading and initializing the built-in web server interface to the device settings. If that were removed from the firmware package, it could probably boot in less than 30 seconds. It would also take away a lot of flexibility for teams to tweak their network setup.

Given a couple of years with the same radio, I expect that the bootup time could be drastically slashed while providing teams with the appropriate tools to configure the device. That's probably not going to happen this year, though.

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One thing I wonder is that if when you configure the radio for field use, maybe the web dash could be disabled. There's no way anyway into the radio after it's been programmed without resetting it, so in competition mode that most likely would not be an issue. Especially as the firmware programmer and team flasher would work anyway without the dashboard.

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+9001

mDNS seemed to be finicky on this access port as well.

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Last year's R31 exception to the main battery read:
So, even with the same rule, a battery integral to the radio in its COTS state would have been legal. All they'd have to do is not disqualify it in a blue box or Q&A by deciding that the radio was something other than a computing device.

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Or we could just go with the fact that R31 currently does not exist for the 2017 season and does not matter in this discussion...

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Are you saying "change is coming"?

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Well done sir.

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imo i think you are just bad at giving out rep might i suggest arbitrary negative rep towards the following accounts:

this one

definitiely this one

probably this one since he is 18 harassment is ok

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Hey! I take back all the nice things I never said about you.

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No question that boot time is a big downside of the OM5P-AN. It's ~60 seconds, compared to ~25 seconds for the previous d-link radio.

Considering the optimization target "number of seconds of robot-match time when the robot sat there unable to communicate", it is far superior to the d-link.

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You definitely forgot a few, but this is a start!

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I'm 19 and a half minus 1 month okay!!

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I hadn't taken that into account, mine was from when the robot stops moving to when the DS can move it successfully. Just for the sake of clarity, my total seems a bit larger, though roughly similar to the numbers you've seen. I wasn't exactly counting, it was during me watching a match I saw it happen and got my numbers, so take it with a grain of salt.

Though this is just my two cents, but if the device prioritized services (DHCP & Routing) above the webGUI, it'd help boot times, though this might be totally contrary to the way OpenMesh has the device configured.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the competition image use different firmware than the home use version? In that case, why don't you include the web UI on the home versions, but not a competition ready version? I don't believe you're legally allowed to change the competition firmware. I also don't believe anyone's complaining about the speed at home.

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I don't know if FIRST has actually told us if the firmwares are different. I would hope they would be the same, in the interest of letting us test at home in as close to a competition manor as possible. The real difference is in the security settings, which within a given firmware could easily be turned on or off to allow secure connection to the field or unsecured connection at home. That's how it worked on the old radios.

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Believe it or not, it is actually possible to do that. I don't know HOW a bunch got messed up, or HOW they got set back to working by way of factory settings... but I do know THAT that did happen!

But yes, that minute-long boot time is quite annoying. Take that away and maybe teams don't have to power in queue just to start the match on time...

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I know that we are now beating a dead horse, but maybe if we kill it again someone will listen.
Seriously though, while I'm sure FIRST HQ is already looking at how to solve this problem I will ad my voice to the cry for a faster boot time. Can we go back to the old, I mean REALLY OLD radios that were literally ready in about 10 seconds. These were before WiFi and while I love the benefits that WiFi brings our t-shirt shooter is one of my favorite robots because it has that old IFI system where the robot and driver station are both ready to go in about 20 seconds tops.

We had a situation at Palmetto this year where, in the elims, we were not sure if we would make it onto the field because we had to power up our robot to reset it and due to the long boot time we struggled to get it reset in time. We only made it out in time because the FTA had sympathy for us recognizing that our problem was something we had no control over.

If we had the space to put one I would swap our radio for one of the old D-Links because they boot so much quicker and a fast boot time is so important when you are struggling to make a match in time, but it is also important when you have a bunch of small children who want to see the robot run, but you are losing their attention because the darn thing is taking what seems like 3 years to boot up.

I think now the horse is sufficiently beat.

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I agree fully. The old routers were better than the current model in virtually every way. Sure, the size reduction was nice, but it would be so much better to go back to the old routers (or a similar model) with the features we need (fast bootup, physical reset button, 3+ ports) instead of the features we want (smaller footprint, blinkier lights).

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While a do like the old radio for things like being at home, on the field I would take the new radio hands down over the old one. I saw multiple times where multiple teams were using 5+ Mbps of bandwidth, and the field had no problems. The dlinks went into death mode in a situation like this, and it was not a solvable problem. Once these radios were connected, barring a power issues their connection to the field was miles above the old ones and I would never want to go back.

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The OpenMesh radios fixed many connections issues on the field. I hope the FRC-specific firmware can pass the FCC regulations. The radios are part of the reason there are no more "x-mas trees" with FMS. They also actually perform QoS versus the D-links and can enforce bandwidth caps.

If your robot repeatedly reset on the field, it may have been the power connection to the radio or a brownout condition. I watched several teams drop after an impact of some sort. A more resilient connector would be great.

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I believe fargus was actually referring to the radio-modems we used to use way back when. They were made first by Motorola and then by IFI. They used hobby radio frequencies. While they would "boot" faster than you could walk off the field they also had numerous operational issues that people tend to forget, Including being susceptible to outside interference and having groups of frequencies that could not be used together.

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In the 4 events I FTA'd, I can't remember one instance where the power problem was the connector at the radio. Every instance that I quickly troubleshot at the end of a match was at either the VRM or the PDB if it was only the radio that cycled and not the whole robot. All I had to do was touch the wires at those points and the radio would cycle. Wiedmuller connections still seem to be a difficulty for many teams to master as many of the problems were too much/little stripped or whiskers shorting between contacts.

However, most robot power problems I witnessed were with 6 gauge wire connections at the Battery, Breaker, and/or PDB being loose and those didn't change from last year. If those are not tight (zero wiggling allowed), you will lose connection with impact or just acceleration.

Even though I could have done without the long bootup, I loved the connectivity vs the D-Link. I went from previously having to tell teams to reduce camera resolution/framerate to keep matches clean for everyone on the field to suggesting they ought to for their own happiness since they were only hurting themselves. I had one team in their first match have issues when they had Qty 3, simultaneous 640x480/30fps camera feeds going, and no other teams in that match were affected. It was very nice looking at the log on the FMS for that match with beautiful numbers for everyone else.

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You asked for it: You're wrong. :p

There's a persistent belief by some people that there was a competition-specific version of the firmware. I think that's based on a misunderstanding of just what it means for the OM5P's power light to be on and steady. When powering it up, the power light comes on and stays on just long enough to trick people into thinking it's ready to be reconfigured at the kiosk, but then it goes off again as the boot process continues. If you click the button on the kiosk too soon, the program fails to find the radio and suggests reloading the firmware.

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Please this. I've set up the DLinks for multiple robots, teams and events more times then I'd care to count. Aside from an event with official FMS etc, it's almost always been easier for me to manually them up. ie reset, set IP, set DHCP, etc. than to find a computer that both has the utility on it, and has NICs that are able to run with it.

The OM5Ps are and don't work terribly but being forced to use the utility is not helpful.

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Sure, but you will also remove the possibility of teams having camera feeds back to their driver station, and you will likely have to cut out a lot of the other diagnostics as well, because the bandwidth on those things is pretty low.

You also have to start dealing with the limited range and the connection dropping when certain objects come between your DS and your robot again.

As for the DLinks from previous seasons- one of the major reasons they were dropped was that they were the biggest culprit in the "christmas trees" that we saw in the past. This is when all robots on the field would start moving jerkily or dropping out completely. The DLinks didn't quite conform to the WiFi standards, in a way that almost guaranteed christmas trees in poor connectivity situations.

Picking a radio for FRC is not an easy task, and it is often a game of tradeoffs. Knowing the team at FRC working on it, I think they understand the tradeoffs and requirements very well and will make a good choice.

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Weren't they already discontinued by the manufacturer? I understand this is a kick to those who bought them for spares, but they were having to look into the new -AC variant anyway, right?

Also this x1000

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The boot times have never bothered me. However I'd love to see a new radio use power over ethernet. Eliminate the barrel connectors that come loose.

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Really? I'd like to think that 60-90 seconds in the middle of a match is pretty significant.

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That is one of the three things I like very much about the OM5P-AN we used this season. (The other two are the highly helpful diagnostic lights and the near-bulletproof performance. The small size is nice, too.)

If your robot's wiring doesn't have problems that make your radio reboot during a match, the boot time isn't a factor during a match.

If the radio does lose power in the middle of a match, the boot time is certainly going to be annoying, but it is not the problem you need to be working on.

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I'm not worried about my robot's wiring. (We did crap out once in Orlando, but no radio is going to withstand the ethernet cable coming out.)

I am, however, worried about my partners' wiring. You know, the partner whose bumpers are tacked together on hopes and dreams and the number is painted on with finger paint? To get everything legal took them so much time that there wasn't time left for robust. And let's be real, inspecting and fixing wiring with matches every few minutes is not feasible. And when I really need them to get their butts onto the batter for this capture, a little safety margin wouldn't be too bad a thing!

Edit because that was a little snarky: We can also work this from the inspiration end. A robot that's dead on the field is highly unlikely to be inspiring. (Not impossible, but unlikely.) And it's those teams on the margins that might be the hardest to retain.

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By worse do you mean this? https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/i...rkKI5Vx9RamnoY

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It's inevitable that many teams will have poor wiring every year. Many radios will reset on the field every year. It would seem to me to be a good idea for FIRST to consider reset time when choosing the next radio. Watching robots dead on the field doesn't help to make it loud.

I watched a practice match on Carver where both 1114, and 330 got disconnected from the field. It can happen to anyone!

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Having a duel power system - one through the barrel and one through the ethernet would definitely help with redundancy. I admit I don't know enough about these radios to know if they will fail-over that way.

But a robot with poor wiring is a robot with poor wiring. They are just as likely to have their roborio die, their VRM drop out, or their speed controls stop.

A faster booting radio would be nice, but I'd rather see a radio that just doesn't need to reboot. Redundant power or just PoE required so that the ethernet latch provides a small measure of security would help those issues significantly.

I'd also like to understand what the impetus is for teams to not want to power their robot on before they are on the field.

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Aside from things like rushed battery changes, what is more dangerous in general: An energized system or a de-energized system?


There are two "energy systems" on the robots: Pneumatic and electrical. Pneumatic, there isn't a way around pressurizing it ahead of time, not if you need the functionality in auto. But, it does generally need the electrical system powered up and responding to controls to activate (unless you happen to know where the manual triggers are). But once the electrical system is powered up, it's powered up and if there's a problem, you'll notice...

Also, there's the "the gyro initializes on startup, so we need to be done placing the robot before we start the robot" crowd. Others call them "inexperienced programmers".

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:(

It's possible for even nicely wired radios to have their power come out. 5895 (our pit was next to them) and a few other teams at worlds found that the new radio's power port eventually gets a little loose and it becomes easier for the plug to come out.

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We had some radio disconnects during driver practice, and we found the loose connections that caused them. AFAIK, we had no disconnects during competition this year. However, if the radio model were not specified by FIRST, I can confidently say that a short (re)boot time would be among our requirements and specifications.

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People hated these radio's because every time their robot rebooted on the field they blamed it on the bad radio. Sorry but it was probably something loose in your rats nest.

That said I didn't like the new radios power plugs as they were a bit looser then the dlinks. They were also more awkward to mount. Oh yea boot times :deadhorse:

In all reality if they made the things boot faster and put us back to recycle rush we would all love them.

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Actually, The OM5P can use power over ethernet, this was even legal in the 2016 rules.

It's just a case of getting the right wires working. It was half-heartedly explored here

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Not a radio, but still garbage. We broke it so we also needed a replacement for 1 season. Ugh.

The 1522 RevA is infamous for Einstein 2012.

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Solved.

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That clamp needs speed holes or you should switch to zip ties. :cool:

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I'm not a betting man, but I'd wager that a significant percentage of the radio reboots happened because the power connector wouldn't stay in unless you taped the darn thing.

Regardless of rat's nest wiring or not, it's still a pretty bad situation to sit there still for the majority of the match just because your radio power cycled...

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One of our early Saturday matches had that happen... despite enough electrical tape that it probably degraded the signal significantly.

Unfortunately it wasn't until after our only competition did we find out we can power it via PoE from the VRM and the power connector for redundancy.

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I'd take the other side of that bet in a second. Of the 300+ matches I helped run this year, nearly all of the issues with radio power were upstream of the barrel connector. It was possible for it to come out, just not common.

The staff made good engineering tradeoffs this year on radio features.

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I'm with you on the bet. Once we tightened the connections on the 120A circuit, our radio disconnects went away.

I'd still like to see quicker network connections, both for demos and competition. The long cycle time on initial connection made troubleshooting far more time consuming than it should have been.

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I was CSA at five events this past season. I think I might have seen three occasions where the power connection at the radio was an issue, and one of them was because the team was using the wrong size connector.

If you want quicker connections for troubleshooting, use USB tethering.

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We had our barrel connector come out twice, and we used the right size connector. One incident that was particularly humorous is when a team's defense manipulation arm actually landed on the radio connector with lots of speed / force, pulling it out of the radio. So I guess that's one reason to use PoE.

[FRC Blog] Radio Silence
 

A trick we used was to loop a ziptie around the barrel connector. Using this method, we had one FMS disconnect the entire season (caused by a faulty Ethernet cable).

http://i.imgur.com/GdhH1Tq.jpg

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You should place that bet. I saw a multitude of radio barrel connectors eject themselves vs defenses (especially the rock wall). After each occurrence I advised teams to tape the connectors in place and it resolved their problems. From the detailed notes I took as FTA, I'd be willing to wager that 75% of the "phantom" radio reboots were related to power on the radio end, not the VRM.

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While I understand that the VRM is likely not the cause for the radio dropouts, at a system level all components of the system should be compatible. Compatibility requires an assessment of such factors as tolerance stack-up.

The present VRM can provide Voltages as low as 11.93 Volts at the regulated 12 Volt output. It might be wise to require that the radio operate within the present system - or to alter the present system to operate the radio.

Either specify ~11.5 Volts as the minimum operating Voltage at the radio input or change the VRM such that it provides a minimum of ~12.5 Volts at the 12 Volt output. Either of these solutions removes the possibility of hardware conflict due to Voltage tolerance.

Intended as a suggestion.

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If you want to do that, then FIRST doesn't need to police the WiFi band any more and the camera limits go away. So this is probably exactly the opposite of the issue. As long as FIRST allows teams to continue to use WiFi and puts FMS only on the 900Mhz then there is no real issue except a slightly more heavy robot.

In point of fact during the bid round in which the RoboRIO was accepted I proposed in writing to FIRST this exact solution.

That's interesting. Why would 900MHz have a harder time with objects than 2.4GHz or 5GHz? It should be the opposite unless you turn down the 900MHz transmit power substantially. In 1996 we used 900MHz serial for the robot control to the Parallax BASIC Stamp 2 control system with large metal field pieces and I saw no evidence of this issue.

The D-Links were FCC certified and confirm to the necessary transmit and receive standards. They didn't fully support QoS correctly and therefore the harder the field tried to rate shape them the harder they'd try to send. They only made it worse with some crazy boot behavior and TCP/IP oddities.

Then again if we simply stop allowing power to the radios to be disconnected we'd not have to worry about these crazy boot issues except when loading the field. I really think FIRST should find a way to support batteries for those radios as others have mentioned, but finding a wide enough selection of COTS radios with this feature is going to be tough. I doubt FIRST wants to make custom mobile robot radios as I have mentioned it to them before.

On this we agree these stationary bi-directional transmitters were not meant for mobile robot applications. It's literally a game of compromises till someone decides to make a mobile robot radio in the price range. Frankly the compromises do not actually bother me - the lack of warning about those compromises does bother me. I really do think you can't test for all the problems you will find in use with the sample set you will likely have before you buy. Therefore I am neither surprised nor all that frustrated by Kate's announcement. These radios are cheap compared to the cost of sitting dead on a field. I am actually happy that FIRST has realized the importance to the degree that they are prepared to try to do better continuously even if this is inconvenient.

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So much this. The only real benefit to using WiFi instead of Serial over 900Mhz is the ability to have live video feedback to the driver station, actual command signals take far less bandwidth.

Considering that for most teams reliable video feeds from the robot is nice to have but not a necessity (except those doing vision processing on the laptops of course), to me it makes far more sense to ensure a reliable command signal to the robots over the luxury of a video feed. The old radios (pre-2009) would boot and connect in under 5 seconds, and were supported by a backup battery (through the controller), meaning even if you did somehow drop connection, you'd pick it back up almost instantly, no more sitting on the field for half of the match because of a momentary brownout or sudden impact.

Switching away from the overcrowded 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies alone would be a huge benefit to field connectivity (plus people could set up WiFi in the pits again), and separating control signals from video could open up more bandwidth for both. Plus these days there are a ton of options available for compact radios of various frequencies due to the growth in the RC aircraft and DIY electronics communities, so finding a suitable Transmitter + Receiver for FRC uses should be much easier now than it was 10 years ago.

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The big issue with the DLinks was that the frequency backoff was hardcoded into the radio, and the value was the same for every radio produced. This meant that if they ever interfered with eachother, that would all start trying to separate from each other, but they would do so at the same rate, which just caused them to keep interfering. That was the root cause for the Christmas Trees. The new radios have that number legitimately randomize, which actually actively allow the radios to not interfere with each other. So even though they were FCC certified, for our uses they had issues, and our options for radios have to be specialized so those issues don't happen.

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Why would that be an issue? You could christmas tree with a single field and all the radios sharing 1 or 2 channels. All 6 robots share those channels if this were the case as you propose a single collision would take out the whole field and clearly that did not happen as packet loss was constant. Where were they going to frequency hunt when they are channel locked? Now on the few occasions they had single channels with no channel bonding there were some christmas trees but they also had lots of traffic from video cameras all trying to flood into the field and competing with the TCP mechanism for re-transmit. QoS is supposed to alter this behavior to give FMS the advantage without making the cameras retry more and more.

Furthermore: even if they follow the same path to degrade they are all at various orientations, distances and signal strengths so the odds are very low they'd actually all block in that way.

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I completely disagree. The camera feed on our driver station was extremely important to us this year. We played several matches without it, and it made it extremely hard for our driver to line up a shot, and I am very confident we are not the only ones to rely on a camera this year. Although I understand there are connection issues, taking a brute force approach and taking away something that teams use is a little absurd. I am sure that we can find a solution that works for everyone.

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I would be a fan of a proprietary low bandwidth (but quick connecting) radio for controls channels, and then the option for teams to run wifi as well for anything they desire.

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Don't get me wrong, having a live feed is extremely useful, but if you had the choice of possibly spotty camera connectivity / low fps but near-perfect control connectivity, or a single connection point that will leave you dead on the field for half the match if ANYTHING goes wrong, which would you pick?

Personally I'd rather have continuous control and a possibly temperamental camera connection than the chance of having my whole robot parked on the field doing nothing. I also think that, if the rules continue to allow driver station cameras, it will eliminate much of the need on-board cameras due to the far better framerate and resolutions possible with such a setup. On-board cameras are still great for targeting, but there are plenty of ways to score a goal reliably that don't require a live video link.

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It's not really brute force to ask a team to provide a path for their own video.
Allegedly the FMS safety controls override the value of video.
If this is the case then there should be no video on the control connection at all.

Again - what was suggested was not no video - it was video on WiFi and FMS on a lower frequency.
Hypothetically FIRST would police and insure the FMS lower frequency, the teams would be responsible for their WiFi.
FIRST could then return to using simple spectrum and protocol analyzers.
Keep in mind that lower frequencies will change sometimes based on venue because the competition is now International.

As a CSA who has watched the video over WiFi issue for a number of years, and someone that made video over WiFi for military robotics, all I am suggesting is that we let this crazy video mess fend for itself.