There was an interesting post
here located in this
thread that talks about what could be causing such pervasive connectivity issues.
MAldridge raises an interesting point about the firmware that runs the FMS.
Quote:
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You will quickly find that it is only barely stable, and that the it suffers from huge amounts of odd quirks inherent to VB.NET apps. It is clear to me that the FMS program itself is the root of this evil. Since it handles the WiFi system, it is also to blame for the oddness of connections that work perfectly on one field but not on another, or robots that work on the practice field, but not on the real field. The FMS program is in dire need of a re-write, preferably in LabVIEW, which most FTA's can debug errors from very quickly.
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I can't make a recommendation on what language it should be rewritten in (I'm a drafter Jim, not a programmer!) but according to his research that seems to be the cause of many (if not all) of the connectivity issues. How is this on topic with the subject at hand you might be asking? Well in regards to the OP about utilizing the resources that FIRST has, if FIRST was allowed to install custom firmware onto those FMS devices (the answer of which, I'm not sure about to be honest) they could have the hundreds if not thousands of programming mentors out there (and even some of the student prodigies) contribute to an open source firmware initiative to use on the FMS and (possibly) solve these connectivity issues. I could imagine FIRST starting an account on GITHUB for everyone to contribute code and get some properly working and stable firmware. FIRST is all about bringing people together in a mutual love of science and technology, and what could be more indicative of that than a crowd-sourced FOSS initiative for fixing any software bugs/glitches in the FMS firmware?
Just my 2 cents. I'm sure I made some incorrect assumptions as well as used some terminology incorrectly in a few places, but I hope I got the point across clearly enough.