
29-04-2012, 16:48
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Registered User
AKA: Scooby
no team
Team Role: College Student
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Rookie Year: 2009
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 1,335
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Re: Einstein 2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanN
I honestly think the air is saturated with radio signals. This is how I'm thinking about it. A radio wave is not any different from a light wave, right? Except on a different wavelength, right? You have a few white lights, but you're not worried about the white lights, what you're worried about is the flashing red light. It's easy to follow the red light when there are just a few white lights, but imagine if you have tons of white lights, and not just white lights, blue ones, green dones, ultraviolet ones, every color... Now try to follow the red light you started off with.
It's impossible. And to amuse myself some more... different colored light is just a different wavelength. The channels and frequencies of radio waves of the routers we use, and the cell phones we use are no different. People much smarter than I am have figured out ways to filter out all these other frequencies, but there is a limit to how many radio waves there can be at a single time.
I imagine that there were tons of people in the stands, wrapping around the field, during the Einstein matches. Each person (assumed) is carrying a cell phone. Many of them on laptops. Instead of having a faraday cage where no signals go through, you're concentrating all the signals from every cell phone to the field like a parabolic dish.
Basically, my best guess is that the issues teams are having are interference. Why some teams don't have it, and some teams do is unknown to me. I noticed a big difference, minus the actual ability to connect and remain connected to the field that Friday night at Bayou. The difference was dropped packets. When we were on the field with 5 other robots and the crowd, we had very high packet loss and latency. When no one was there on Friday night, or even the one match we played on Thursday, when no one was there, we had very low packet loss and latency.
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Excellent analogy with the light waves, but my question in response to this theory (and I'm nowhere near an expert, or knowledgeable at all in this field, so it's not rhetorical, it's an actual question) is if it happened so strongly at this level on Einstein this year, why has it not happened in the past? Wasn't last year's control/field system as a whole(minus the Kinect) the EXACT same components as this season?
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