Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy A.
I remember the 900mhz radios from the IFI days. I'll take wifi over that any day of the week.
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An interesting view to be sure:
I'm unsure why you would have it though...
Those 900MHz radios (Rebranded
EWave Inc. Screamer422's) were ready to go nearly instantaneously, and capable of 9.6kbps. a little over 1KB/s.
4 years of FRC experience with 2.4/5GHz wifi a/g/n has taught me that its an unreliable standard. Delays to matches are common. Sometimes robots refuse to connect, and they often drop connection mid match, PLUS, being such a widely accepted standard, with a large range of compatible devices, it opens the door to attacks such as what happened at Einstein 2012. They also experience issues because we're using consumer-grade electronics that were never designed for the sort of dynamic loading environment an FRC bot creates. We're using routers that were intended to sit under peoples desks at home and never move.
6 years of FRC experience with the 900MHz serial radio modems taught me that they are essentially bulletproof. I don't think I ever saw one fail in any fashion due to being roughhoused aboard an FRC bot, and I don't remember ever having a radio related match delay. Additionally, the 900MHz band is several orders of magnitude quieter in terms of noise from other consumer electronics, AND has longer range. Its also much tougher to attempt various kinds of attacks on the 900MHz band, as radios are less proliferous.
I certainly won't attempt to say you could shove streaming video over 9.6kbps. I know you can't. There are definitely other technologies that would be better suited than wifi, though.
I would estimate the bandwidth needed for a typical FRC bot carrying streaming video to be somewhere in the range of 2Mbps, allowing for 320x240 streaming video uncompressed, with some overhead for control comms.