[Greg McKaskle]

To add to the other good advice. The latency of a wired ethernet connection is ~1ms. It will degrade if lots of other traffic is present, or if one end is busy, but that is unlikely to happen, is easy to measure, and easy to control. Gigabit ethernet is one of the big standards for industrial camera control and streaming.

Another nice aspect if this is that you can easily modify the connection lengths and topology during the season. The devices can be on bench while the roboRIO is on robot and your laptop is at a desk. When they make room for the devices, you can shorten the cable, remove a switch, etc. And you can substitute devices easily too. If it has the IP or DNS info, it is the droid you are looking for. This allows you to experiment and incrementally deploy while keeping developer tools friendly.

If you decide that you want most of the network table data shared between your targets, then that is a good option -- over TCP by the way. If you only want data shared one direction, or a specific subset of data, it is very easy to serialize your data, send it over either TCP or UDP, and deserialize it on the other target. You can also add it to network tables once received. There plenty examples for doing this in all languages, and the transport of the data is language independent.

Greg McKaskle