[dsherw00d]

We had one round where we were dead the entire round. A FRC tech person came over and viewed the DS logs and tested the robot. He found nothing unusual. We had a second round where we were dead after autonomous, then disabled the Ethernet port, re-enabled, and it all came back. It took around a minute to do this. Since we were not doing well, it was not a big issue.

It would be great see a detailed network diagram with configuration files of the devices. I understand they need to keep the system secure and not sharing details helps. If there are 9 VLANs (why 9 with 6 robots?), it should be easy to guarantee every team 100Mbs of bandwidth. The cRIO is 100Mbs plus maybe another 1Mbs for the camera stream. What do the 6 bridged radios connect to? I looked once and it wasn't a DLINK, but can't remember what it is. This shuold be a business/enterprise class device. There could also be an issue with the queues on the FMS Ethernet hardware, but if it can't handle max 600Mbs of traffic non-blocking, it must be outdated or mis-configured. Depending on frame sizes, a GigE port can start dropping traffic at 600Mbs depending on the quality of the device. Another possibility would be to use secure tunnels instead of VLANs. An IPSec tunnel with 100Mbs guarantee between the robot and the wireless router with the IP traffic receiving the highest priority marking. If they are only dealing with the Layer 2 VLANs, they have no way of guaranteeing the Layer 3 IP traffic. All traffic should also be mirrored to another port so Wireshark or the like can run an offline trace in case there is an issue or challenge. They should be able to determine what every dropped frame/packet is and where it came from. If dropping radios is a issue, I bet it can be traced back to the same issue in all cases.

I agree with a previous poster that the hundreds if not 1000s of WiFi capable smart phones/ipads/kindles/laptops are always searching for networks. Maybe this is impacting the radios. At the figerlakes (RIT), they actaully swapped out the robot radios with a business class DLINK due to discovered issues with large amounts of wireless traffic and the way the DLINK discovered/connected to these networks. I believe it was related to how many MAC address the cheaper DLINK can store and how long it took it to clear MACs. We do need better radios.