As many of you have found, FIRST’s change this year to get rid of the router and control the robot in testing environments through the laptop’s built in WiFi is a double edged sword. If your laptop includes dual band N capability it’s a godsend. If it’s in a electrically quiet lab it may work fine as well. It means you don’t have to haul around that silly router. Alas the Classmate that FIRST provides doesn’t do N at all, let alone dual band N. That means your robot is being controlled over the same frequencies as plain old WiFi 802.11G and a million other unlicensed devices like cordless phones, Bluetooth, etc. The results can be disappointing in any environment where there are a lot of signals around. Robots that start and stop and drive erratically are bad news!
For our outreach events and scrimmages, we'd like to find a cheap solution so that teams can just show up with a control system that works in the 5GHz band with no fuss. If they don't have a laptop with dual band N, one possible solution is a dual band USB ntework adapter. Many companies make these but the Linksys version is
here. They are $40 new or $20 refurbished.
Has anyone tried this kind of network adapter with a Classmate controlling a robot?