[techhelpbb]

Been thinking about this some more...

When it comes to the idea of sharing video between teams which is less complicated?

1. Sharing or worse duplicating the video over the network to the other teams.
2. Offering them to look at your display of that video?

Obviously 2 is far less complicated!

If FIRST really wanted to allow this all they would have to do is allow teams to put an extra monitor on their driver's station which the other alliance members could see. Or they could let users transfer their images to Android devices as mass storage over USB from their driver's station and simply run a slideshow against that storage to the display in the same manner. Put that up against the barrier and the team immediately next to you can see your video with no field network load. Just some additional COTS device and some cables.

Also it occurs to me that when I helped propose an alternative to the cRIO we suggested that we send the FMS packets down a separate slower lower frequency radio link and let the teams use any other WiFi however they like. This would of allowed teams to share as they like as WiFi would be completely irrelevant to the FIRST field operations and it would dramatically remove the spectrum competition for the radio. Course it also would have made it the teams headache to deal with the consequences if it went terribly wrong or was interfered with.

I am personally of the opinion that the field's use of WiFi in this manner is actually more annoying to the people that want to use WiFi and TCP/IP for things like video and sharing than if the field only sent the FMS packets on a lower frequency. It puts FIRST in the position of stifling innovation to protect the field operations for business reasons. It also also gives the students trying to use TCP/IP less opportunity to be exposed to the entire operational aspect because they simply can't control what the current fields impose on them. What the current field does now is not truly analogous to real time video over most of the Internet so that is not a salvageable counterposition.