Wireless Networking Problems

[jtechau]

We tried wireless communication with the robot as per the FRC instructions last night for the first time. It worked for a short while, then stopped working. We eventually concluded that the apparent cause of problems was that the laptop's ethernet and wireless adapters were both set to the required 10.xx.xx.5 IP address - and even when one of the adapters (LAN or wireless) was disabled, this was apparently causing problems.

What eventually worked for us was to set the wireless adapter back to DHCP, and use the LAN adapter connected to the Linksys router, with the robot's DAP-1522 set to bridge mode. (Falling back to last year's known-good configuration.)

I disagree with those who claim that a router is the cause of problems. It should work that way - in fact, it has to work that way in the competition setup. It should work either way - connecting the DS through the router with the DAP-1522 set as bridge, or directly to the DAP-1522 set as AP.

We still want to use the recommended setup - DAP-1522 as the AP/router, with the laptop directly connecting to the robot. I'm still uncertain how the DS software manages network connections, though. It cannot set both/all network adapters to the same IP address. So how does it choose between the LAN adapter and the wireless adapter? Or do we have to manually set up the network configuration?

I've heard that the DS software has been improved this year in regards to IP configuration, specifically for Win7. We're still using XP on our development platform (with this year's DS, etc). Can anyone enlighten us as to how the DS manages IP configurations this year?