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Originally Posted by nic_radford
But if we were all using WIFI to talk to all of our robots.....hmm....Could y'all imagine!
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Oh yeah, I can imagine...
I can imagine what it would be like for our drivers to move the controls, only to have the robot react 500ms later because someone thought it would be fun to stream a webcam from their robot over the wireless network control system, and it's hogging all the bandwidth!
Everyone always talks about how great wireless IP would be. Has anyone given that real thought? You'd need a continuous stream of data coming from and going to EACH OI. Since 802.11 is a shared medium, that means you will get collisions between packets. Guess what happens when there's collisions? Each of the transmitters backs off and retries a random amount of time later. Do you want YOUR robot to be the one that chose to back off the maximum amount of time while your opponent's robot backed off the minimum amount of time? I don't.
Consider also that any person in the arena could have a laptop and now try to (intentionally or not) associate with the field's wireless system. I know that FIRST is a generally trusting community, but the potential for easy abuse here would be large, and it would only take 1 person to decide that it would be fun to associate and flood-ping and watch the match stop to ruin it for everyone. And sure, you can encrypt, but now you have even MORE latency and more horsepower needed to decode.
Next consider that many venues are in college arenas, and most of them probably have wireless networks. Now you've got a potential problem of not being able to find a free WiFi channel... oops.
Anyway, I'll say "no thanks" to WiFi control and instead hope that IFI keeps our current, dedicated-bandwidth-for-each-team system. If channels really are the problem, I'm sure IFI will find a great way to solve that as they do all the other problems they run into.