Quote:
Originally Posted by dave1027
While light based applications could technically function the bad part is that they require line of sight to work, the nice thing about the field based network is that it already exists and would require very little effort to make it work.
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Personally I am of the opinion that the field network is already stressed to the max by multiple teams using TCP based real time video back to the driver's stations.
These TCP flows can be so large that the video actually starves the UDP FMS packets to the robots and can often end up with your robot disabled and your control performance compromised. These show as missing packets on the field display and in the driver's station DS logs. FIRST made a serious investment in load balancing for the fields to keep this problem bottled up.
I would be concerned that opening the door to bi-directional inter-team communication on a network that can be so heavily saturated could lead to headaches where one team could inadvertently swamp their own alliance.
In this regard reducing that protection might not improve things for your alliance.
The other solutions (though line of sight) at least move this extra load off the field making the proof of concept a little less likely to result in unpleasant surprises. So in this regard I think the amount of effort for FIRST to actually QA this on their field network is way bigger than anyone realizes.
This also, in my mind, falls back into the idea that such communications should be simple and short lived.
The alternatives to the field are slower and will encourage brevity and simplicity.
Why send full video to your alliance peers when you can send messages like 'ready to shoot'?
TCP/IP is too often used like a hammer and every communications problem becomes a vastly more complicated nail.
(Ironic I wrote this because I have been writing Ruby HTTP functions all day that can do Windows Authentication without using the existing work which tends to mask exceptions I need to see for security reasons. So I make this post and then get back to my POST / HTTP/1.1).