Wifi at St Joseph Event

[hardcopi]

I want to just thank St Joe for letting one of our sponsors put up wifi antennas all over the venue this weekend. They worked great, no issues with the field and even the FTA's seemed to like them. We had at peak more than 300 different devices connected. Also want to thank St Joe for the bandwidth we used.

The Pod will be at Kentwood this coming week and then hopefully Lansing if they ever get back to us.

Last year we did this and it was pretty much overwhelmed. This year we have another 3 antennas and about $20,000 worth of equipment so it seems to be helping a lot.

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by hardcopi

The Pod will be at Kentwood this coming week ...

Kentwood is Week 5, so it looks like you're getting an early start.

Seriously, the wifi your sponsor provided was a great improvement over last year. Being connected improves the event experience for everyone. Thank you and your sponsor for helping make St. Joseph an inspirational time.

[hardcopi]

We aren't going to Kentwood this year so I guess I didn't pay attention to the date.

Yeah First Events taxed their equipment last year. Sporting events, new years eve celebrations it didn't have any issues with but a Michigan First event overloaded it.

[Ozuru]

But...but...WiFi causes the field to crash! And robots to become e-stopped! And planes to crash!

[Bryan Herbst]

Originally Posted by Ozuru

But...but...WiFi causes the field to crash! And robots to become e-stopped! And planes to crash!

Having too much WiFi noise was a huge problem with the D-Link radios, which by IEEE standards were configured poorly to handle less than ideal situations. Basically having 6 of those on a field with either too much interference or high bandwidth utilization guaranteed lost communication. Sarcasm aside, this was the cause of many communications issues in the past.

The OM5P-AN radios do a much better job at managing these situations and will properly self-adjust to less than ideal situations, making venue WiFi a viable option going forward.

[hardcopi]

Basically we have $20,000 worth of equipment and a network engineer on-site to make sure everything was configured properly and wouldn't interfere. Actually probably had a lot less interference at St Joe this year because of it. With readily available wifi I saw a lot less hotspots popping up.

Wifi isn't the issue, wifi that is on the same band as the field is. Our Pod was programmed so it didn't touch the field's preferred band. (I'm not a network engineer so I could be misquoting here).

Ultimately we'd love to bundle a pod with each field. This would eliminate the "wifi" issue at every single event.

[GreenITMentor]

As a mentor of a team competing in Saint Joseph the free Wi-Fi was great. It saved us using cellular data. I am not aware of any wi-fi related problems. We will miss not having it at our next competition.


Great implementation hardcopi!

[mhaeberli]

I suspect I'm repeating an oft-stated view when I say that permitted / sanctioned open WiFi in the pits and field(s) would be a real help, AND would discourage "bandits" consciously or unconsciously violating the request not to run their own hotspots in a venue. It would be great to have this at EVERY competition.

Going one step further, it would be a real help to programmers, in this era of GitHub, if we could also figure out default configurations for programming / drive laptops that could talk to a robot on the practice field or the pit AND talk to a WiFi network at the same time, for research, chiefdelphi searches, GitHub access, etc.

Martin Haeberli
(de-)mentor, FRC 3045 Gear Gremlins (formerly SWAT)

[IronicDeadBird]

Are there ways in which FRC could add an area for wifi? I mean they have a practice field, and often machining equipment.

[Type]

It was great having wifi. We tried to setup the live stream in our pits to be able to see it better than on the projector but learned that there is probably a 20 second delay between the two, but we were still able to see the videos FiM had to rewatch our games.

[ProfessorAlekM]

It's nice to hear that you guys aren't having to much trouble with the internet interfering with your robot. When we test the robot at our school, we loose connection constantly when we are near the router.

[dag0620]

This seems really cool! I'd love for you to keep sharing about the continued success of this. If it works well, future expansion to other districts would be a nice thing to see.

[emmabdalton]

Originally Posted by hardcopi

Basically we have $20,000 worth of equipment and a network engineer on-site to make sure everything was configured properly and wouldn't interfere. Actually probably had a lot less interference at St Joe this year because of it. With readily available wifi I saw a lot less hotspots popping up.

Wifi isn't the issue, wifi that is on the same band as the field is. Our Pod was programmed so it didn't touch the field's preferred band. (I'm not a network engineer so I could be misquoting here).

Ultimately we'd love to bundle a pod with each field. This would eliminate the "wifi" issue at every single event.

This should honestly be at every event. Even trying to fix our profiling app was a huge struggle because we couldn't get onto wifi, even though all the tablets had Sourcetree installed and it would have taken no time at all to pull down an update. Also would be great to have for the purpose of transferring match data to our chief strategist in the pits before meetings with alliance partners... Many headaches and heart attacks from the profiling team could be avoided.

[pingfx]

Does anyone know who we should talk to at FRC to try and get this service at every event? Our idea is to provide a "kit" that travels with each field that can be setup by the volunteers that setup each field. We can then remotely optimize the network and provide any pertinent statistics to the school or event coordinator.

If anyone knows who the "right" person to talk to is please let me know and we will work to get this much needed service in place.

-Chris "wifiguy"
cheighway@il2k.net

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by pingfx

Does anyone know who we should talk to at FRC to try and get this service at every event?

You'd need to contact the planning committee for the event. That's who will know the relevant details of the venue.

I'm a little unclear on something -- does this equipment provide an internet connection, or does it have to connect to an existing one?