[DavisDad]

From the FTC forum re wireless comms: Tom Eng (FTC Engineer)

The new platform uses WiFi Direct technology to provide point-to-point communications between the driver station and the robot. WiFi Direct is an industry standard and it provides reliable, robust and scalable communications between mobile and other devices (laptops and devices such as printers can support WiFi Direct). The wireless radios that are available on the new Android devices are significantly faster and can tolerate a greater amount of background wireless noise than our previous wireless control system.

Also, since the new platform is based on Android, as wireless technology and WiFi standards evolve, these changes will be incorporated into the Android platform and become available for use with our control system.

I would like to clarify the development process/environment for the new platform. As mlsamuelson and Jerry McManus mentioned, a typical team would use a computer or laptop to run the Android Studio software. The laptop can be a Windows machine, a Mac, or a Linux machine. The team will write their programs on the laptops, and then can transfer/upload them to the Android device on the robot with a USB cable. In general, your laptop/PC does not need to support WiFi Direct. You can use a simple USB cable to connect and load your programs onto the robot controller (Android device).

Also, it is possible to set up a "wireless adb" connection to upload your program and debug your program wirelessly. With a wireless ADB connection you can connect your development laptop to the Android device wirelessly. You can upload programs to the Android device via the wireless adb connection. You can also monitor/debug the program that is running on the Android device that is attached to the robot through the wireless connection. You can do this even as the Android device on the robot is also being controlled by the driver station.

So to summarize, if you'd like to develop programs for this new platform you can use a Windows PC (7 or 8 are both fine), a Mac, or a Linux machine. You can upload your programs to the Android devices using a USB cable (similar to how you can upload a RobotC or LabView program to an NXT device using a USB cable). You also have the option of doing a wireless ADB connection to upload programs to an Android device and to debug a program running on an Android device.

Hope this info helps.

Tom