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Re: Innovation FIRST Controllers & BattleBots
Posted by Nate Smith.
Other on team #66, GM Powertrain/Willow Run HS, from Eastern Michigan University and GM Powertrain.
Posted on 7/2/2000 5:08 PM MST
In Reply to: Re: Innovation FIRST Controllers & BattleBots posted by Adam Krajewski on 7/2/2000 3:33 PM MST:
: 2. The Innovation FIRST Radio Modems. Is it just me, or were the Motorola radio modems used in previous years less susceptible to interference? Again, nothing concrete, but something to consider.
You'd be suprised what I saw cause problems with the old system that didn't even touch this year's...in '99, my team(74 at the time) tried using one of those RF paging systems that you can get from Radio Shack to keep our team informed at Nationals. Well, as we were setting up our pit on Thursday, and went to fire up the pagers as our engineers were working on the robot. As soon as we sent a page, the drive wheels on our robot started spinning for a couple seconds, WHILE ON TETHER! While I know this doesn't directly relate to the radios, it's still a interference problem that I haven't heard of at all, especially with all the teams using FRS radios to communicate with their team members this year.
Also, the team number attached to each data packet this year helps to increase the reliability. Yes, if you've got 40-50 teams in the pit area all on channel 40(or one of the other 4 accessable channels without an Arena controller), your RC will pick up stray packets from another machine and stop responding, but with each team assigned a unique channel once on the field, interference is all but gone. Not to mention that the RNets were WAY too powerful for what they were being used for during their time as the 'official' FIRST competition radio. I heard a story from FIRST about one year, they were testing RNets before competitions, and picked up a stray signal while scanning the frequencies. It ended up being a team on the other side of town running their machine!
I'm not saying that they're perfect by any means(2.4Ghz would probably be more reliable and less used than the 900Mhz that the IF radios run at), but I still think they're quite an improvement, after working with the RNets for two years.
Nate
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