[RandomStyuff]

It's not exactly those things; It was pretty complicated, having been the only student to stay the night between the 2nd and 3rd day to work on the networking, I can say that it was probably the most improvised system I've ever seen in a production environment:

It was a mix of a series of problems which together caused the fiasco
(The mixing of old and new routers was not really one of them; we rarely had them both running on the field concurrently)

To my understanding, USFIRST sent FIRST Israel a random off-the-shelf router without checking it's settings first (This is due to different wireless regulations in Israel banning the normal router used in the USA). The FTA, assuming USFIRST sent the correct router for the FMS didn't play around with the settings. The router was configured in the most horrible way: default DHCP leases were way to long, even for a normal system (not to mention that there is no need for a DHCP server in this use-case), and therefore the DHCP tables filled up with iPhones and laptops from all over the area in Tel Aviv (the stadium is in a central and busy place, with most phones on auto-connect, it's no surprise!), and the router could not lease IP addresses to the robots. In addition, the router's subnets were mis-configured, both on the robots and on the FMS. The Intelligence Corps guy that worked with us said he was surprised that the robots even managed to work the little they did!

It didn't help that the FMS got damaged in shipping, and therefore the FTA's energy pre-competition was focused on getting that working, instead of checking the wireless.


I think there is plenty to be fixed, but everyone involved did their best in working with what they had available, and I hope the lessons are learnt for next year.