[b-rant]

Originally Posted by Natchez

Ryan,

Thank you very much for the kind acknowledgement BUT, for the record, I was only one of very, very many that helped get the ball rolling for Fusion to have an opportunity to compete at Lone Star. With that said, it is a pleasure helping a team with such a rich history of helping others.

----------------------------------------

Everyone,

For the most part, this has been a good discussion along with good input BUT we still don't have a good answer for what has happened much less a root cause for 364's problems. The Lone Star Regional is very interested in helping 364 and FIRST determine the root cause of these problems. In this spirit, please keep posting ideas of what we should do at the Lone Star Regional to help troubleshoot this problem; we will develop a troubleshooting flow based on everyone's input.

Unless we get a better idea, our first test will be to unbag 364's robot on Thursday and attempt to hook it to the field (e.g. take robot out of bag, put battery in robot, get WPA key, etc.). We also intend to get other robots that have successfully connected at other regionals (57, 118, 231, 418, 624, 653, 1429, 1477, 2415, 3335, etc.) to test their field connections and so we can also have 6 robots connected at the same time. Depending on these test results, we probably have hundreds of options for what the next test should be; if you have any ideas, we'd like to hear about them and we don't care how silly they are (e.g. if 364's robot has no problems connecting, ask everyone in the arena to start turning on the wireless on their laptops and call their mothers from their cell phones to see if we can get 364's robot to shut down ..... if 364's robot will not connect, reconfigure 118's robot to look like 364's robot, use 364's bridge and see if 118's robot connects - the regional may even supply a "Basic Bot" that we can reconfigure). I will guarantee you one thing, our FTA will take everyone's input and will have a rock-solid troubleshooting flow when he walks in the door on Holy Thursday.

Thanks & give us your troubleshooting ideas,
Lucien

Try taking wireshark captures if possible with the field setup during the debug process for some post processing and clear evidence of the issue, if it's network related. http://www.wireshark.org/ and see this: http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/WLAN I haven't messed with wireshark in a while but I had to use it once for checking against some port scanning attacks on a network once, it's a pretty cool tool.

I would also try throwing on Tomato Firmware to some spare routers and set them up the same as they are in a normal match to see if you can get some more network analysis or if the firmware seems to fix the issue. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Tomato_Firmware

Using either one of these utilities should make the issue stand out out like a sore thumb especially if it will be easily reproducible in Lonestar.

The last possibly could just be Ryan, I've never seen someone break so many macbook pro's in my life without touching any hardware but my boy RyanN can. I'm really just kidding on that aspect of course but seriously give some of these utilities a try.

-Brantley