While testing in our shop with our driver's station connected directly (via Wi-Fi) to the robot access point, we have noticed periodic bursts of lost packets on the driver's station graphs. The bursts occur approximately every 2 minutes. According to the driver's station, they are usually between 80% and 100% packet loss. They are usually short in duration, but occasionally the duration and timing can be such that the driver's station reports loss of communications and the fail safes can kick in and disable the motors/etc (at first we thought the PID was flaking out on our shooter when it would hiccup while running). The bursts occur whether the robot is enabled or disabled. In the course of a 3 hr meeting, we will see 5-6 dropped COMM peg counts on the driver's station.
- Our driver's stations (both are showing same behavior on 2 different access points on 2 different subnets) are laptops running Windows10.
- Radio has been updated to the new firmware/configuration. 2017 driver's station software is installed.
- Bursts do NOT occur when connected to the access point with an ethernet cable.
- Bursts resume 4-5 min. after switching back to Wi-Fi (from wired).
- I tried disabling all services on the adapter except IPv4, disabling firewall, netbios, DNS registration, etc. I tried all of the various wireless options associated with the NIC itself, etc. (I have a 2 page list of things I tried so far).
- I talked to other teams and they are seeing similar behavior.
Has anyone else seen these dropped packets? Has anyone found a cause/solution for them?
I know that on the field, the driver's station is connected via a wired connection, but the engineer in me cannot be completely satisfied that the problem will not appear at competition (since the connection from FMS to robot is Wi-Fi) until I know the cause (or a reasonable explanation) of the problem.